Donald Trump is railing against immigrants trying to get into the country, meanwhile we’ve got conservative activists and officers of the court angling to get out. Misogyny, paranoia, xenophobia, oh my! Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the wildest attacks, conspiracy theories, and other loony behavior from the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:
5. Lee Bright
The bill to remove the Confederate flag from South Carolina state grounds made its way relatively briskly through the state legislature and on to Gov. Nikki Haley’s desk — where she signed it Thursday afternoon.
That’s not to say there weren’t some snags. In the House, Representative Michael A. Pitts (R) introduced several amendments in an effort to protract the debates and stall the bill’s passage. Not a single amendment passed, and the House voted overwhelmingly in favor of the bill shortly after 1 a.m. Thursday.
A few days prior to Pitts’ filibuster, Republican South Carolina state senator Lee Bright took to the floor to go on an extended rant — that had very little to do with the Confederate flag. He enjoined his fellow senators to “take a stand” against the “tyranny of five judges,” and the godless agenda of a president who dares to sing “Amazing Grace” one moment and then light up the White House with “abomination colors” the next.
Bright choked back a sob as he said: “We can rally together and talk about a flag all we want but the Devil is taking control of this land and we’re not stopping him!”
Raw Story has the video:
Unmoved by Bright’s free association, the state Senate passed the bill 37-3. And the flag’s set to come down Friday morning at 10 a.m.
ViaRaw Story
4. Jade Helm Reactionaries
Click to enlarge
It’s been a while since we checked in on the federal government’s plot to conquer Texas.
With all the hullabaloo over marriage equality, South Carolina conceding the Civil War after a century-and-a-half delay, and Donald Trump’s endless supply of hot air, I guess it just fell through the cracks. I’m happy to report that Jade Helm 15 — either a series of war games or an Obama-masterminded plot to take over the Lone Star State, depending on which side of the sanity fulcrum you fall on — is coming along nicely.
And so Texas is taking steps to make sure it remains sovereign, self-sufficient, and backed by shiny, shiny gold.
Texas is the only state that still maintains a stockpile of gold — “approximately 5,600 gold bars worth around $650 million,” according to the AP — and now they’ve decided they want it all back within their borders. (The bullion is currently in a Manhattan bank.)
According to the Inquistr, “Texas politicians who support the decision to move the gold to Texas have tried to downplay allegations that they are anticipating the possibility that developments could lead to a secession bid.”
Meanwhile, Chuck Norris has put Obama on notice not to “infringe” on Texas with his military exercise thingy.
And Alex Jones — the talk-radio host who got the ball rolling on much of the conspiracy theorizing when this started — has said: “This is going to be hellish. … Now this is just a cover for deploying the military on the streets. … This is an invasion.”
Long before Texas secedes from the Union, it appears to have seceded from reality.
Next: Roy Moore and Randall Terry
3. Roy Moore and Randall Terry
Speaking of secession, we’ve got a whole bunch of people so worked up over the Obergefell ruling that they’re ready to pack their bags rather than follow the law of the land.
The problem is some of these people are tasked with enforcing said law. That includes the county clerk in Kentucky recently caught on camera refusing to grant any marriage licenses rather than grant them to gay couples; the Texas attorney general who said he would support clerks who took such action; the Texas clerk who posted her own July 4 Declaration, this one in “Defense of Natural Marriage,” in which she asserted her moral and lawful right to be immoral and unlawful.
Conservative activist Randall Terry wants to go a step further: Just secede. Just say “we’ve had enough of this.”
At least Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, with whom Terry sat down for a conversation Monday, appears to be the relatively cooler head here. Moore said it’s “not time to secede” just yet — but officers of the court do have to “take a stand” and not “obey an unlawful order” — invoking the Nuremberg logic that Nazi soldiers had the duty to honor a “higher law.” Yes, really.
Moore asserted that marriage equality is “going to destroy the nation.”
“Then why not get out of the nation?” Terry asks.
Right Wing Watch has the video:
Via Right Wing WatchandThe New Civil Rights Movement.
2. Peter Nolan
Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) are an especially odious species of twit that has crawled out from the slime. Given an occasional brush with legitimacy — as when MRAs under the gentler title “suffragent” get wheeled onto Fox News, most of them exist in dark, rat-trap corners of the internet to sling their venom at anyone in sight.
Peter Andrew Nolan is one such MRA. According to We Hunted The Mammoth, a blog that “tracks and mocks the New Misogyny online,” Nolan has been celebrating a little prematurely the legitimization of the murder of women, claiming that Australian law has made it so.
According to a series of tweets directed at various handles, including that of actress Denise Richards, Nolan believes that the “time for talk is over. The time for men killing women to get your attention has arrived.”
This goes on at some length, and you can view screenshots of the various horrifying tweets here. (Nolan’s Twitter account has been suspended.)
Nolan is also an acolyte of the Sovereign Citizen movement, and so uses unconventional spelling and strange symbols in his name because he believes it undercuts the government’s jurisdiction over him. (He currently goes by the name Joschua-Boehm©.)
Lest anyone is encouraged to dismiss him outright as a troll, We Hunted The Mammoth warns that Nolan
does indeed believe that he is at war with Ireland and Australia, that murdering women is legal in both countries, and that he has the right to enforce these claims of his as best he can.
This isn’t the first time Nolan has justified or indeed celebrated violence against women. His declarations of “war” are not new. He’s offered some (barely) qualified praise for far-right mass murderer Anders Breivik, and at one point he warned any women thinking of commenting on his laughable Facebook ripoff MAN-BOOK that he just might just kill them for it.
But these recent Tweets are pretty brazen, even by his standards. He is clearly a threat to women, as well as to politicians and government employees regardless of gender.
(Please note: This page is called “This Week In Crazy,” but WHTM correctly notes that “mental illness does not cause hate.” Nolan’s vile ideology and threats perhaps warrant more sober consideration than the light touch I’ve given them here.)
1. Michael Savage
Garrulous gasbag and radio host Michael Savage is the patron saint of trolls, reliably churning out the crazy for this page like a well-oiled machine of madness. If he did not exist, I would have to invent him, but I’m not disturbed enough to recreate his mental aerobics, in which everything can be connected to everything else and it all ends with the same solemn condemnations: Grr, Obama. Grr, liberals.
His unhinged arias are paeans to paranoia. One of his latest — from his show Tuesday night — follows a chain of association from welfare programs to — you guessed it — Holocaust-level injustice occurring on our own soil.
“It’s all well and good, the welfare state,” he says. “Until you can’t afford it anymore. And guess what happens then. The country collapses!”
Then you get what the government has always wanted: civil war, insurrection, martial law — “And guess what happens then.”
Yep, “internment camps.”
“And guess what happens then.” And here Savage takes aim at liberals who are content to let this all transpire because, after all, liberals assume that they won’t be the ones locked up in camps. Because liberals think they’re “all powerful” and “above the law.”
Liberals won’t be subjected to the New Obama Order — only Christians and veterans, Savage insists, will be gathered up and locked away. Liberals have what Savage calls the “Army of the Night” behind them, which consists of “illegal alien gangs.”
“We understand your entire plan!” Savage puts liberals on notice. Especially you, Obama, “the insane-est person on the planet.”
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/213971800″ params=”color=ff5500″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
“This is what liberalism brings you,” Savage concludes. “Insanity and murder — and death and disease. It’s the opposite of what they sold you!”
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/213971863″ params=”color=ff5500″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
I listened to your show, Mike. I tried — I really tried — to connect the dots, but all I got was a page of scribbles and a ringing in my ears.
Via Right Wing Watch
Image above: Jesse 1974 via Flickr
