Captain America is anti-American, scientists can nuke the religion right out of your brain, and the End Times are in sight.
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. Rush Limbaugh
In case you were not aware, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified before the House Benghazi Committee Thursday. To give his listeners a taste of what to expect, Rush Limbaugh looked into the tea leaves on his Monday show and predicted the whole thing was “going to be a giant nothing burger.”
Fair enough. The legitimacy of the committee has been thoroughly gutted — thanks in no small part to Republicans cheerfully parading the fact that this has all been one badly botched political hit job.
So yes, it was safe to predict that committee chair Trey Gowdy and his investigation theater show were pretty much D.O.A. — undone by sloppy hubris and a nakedly political agenda. A “giant nothing burger,” indeed.
Oh wait. Rush wasn’t finished.
It is going to be a giant nothing burger. The Democrats will waste as must time as possible praising Hillary for her cervix. Yes I meant that. You think I meant to say service, right? No, they’re going to praise her for being a woman. It’s a big deal now. She’s a victim. It’s the reason she’s running. To be the first woman. So they’re going to praise her cervix. What else is there? When you’re talking about that to praise. They can’t mention the wig. So they’ll praise her — okay, okay, I’ll say service. Just to smooth it over.
Yes. Very “smooth.”
4. Fox & Friends
The folks over at the morning chatterdome Fox & Friends are continuing their project to espy culture warfare in every last nook and cranny. On their Sunday show, they cast their indignation spotlight upon the latest issue of Marvel’s Captain America, which introduces the classic character’s new identity — Sam Wilson, a Black superhero also known as the Falcon (portrayed in the Marvel films by actor Anthony Mackie).
Co-host Clayton Morris described the move as a “publicity stunt” to drive sales and to poison the all-American ideology of traditional superhero comics. Specifically at issue is the fact that Wilson’s foes in this latest storyline are the Sons of the Serpent, which The Comics Book Database describes as a “racist and anti-immigrant extremist group, espousing a white-power ideology, and often seeking to destabilize the U.S. government through terrorist and hate-crime activities.” They claim to defend the laws of God, nature, and the U.S. Constitution. Topical, no?
Captain America is “going up against conservatives! They’re the new enemy!” Morris exclaims.
The Serpent, co-host Tucker Carlson says, is not a jingoist homegrown terrorist. He “is an American who has misgivings about unlimited illegal immigration and the costs associated with it. That, according to the comic, is ‘evil.'”
Morris describes the Serpent as an “odd new enemy,” but far from being an Obama-era weapon of liberal cultural propaganda freshly cooked up to tee off conservatives, the Sons of the Serpent have been wreaking havoc in the pages of Marvel Comics since 1966.
Per Vulture:
Tucker Carlson voices his displeasure that Captain America isn’t fighting ISIS instead of “ordinary Americans, probably some of you watching at home.” Morris chimes back in that he misses the days when “Captain America used to be punching Hitler in the face.” Captain America has not fought Hitler since 1945, you know, the year Hitler died. At the time, Morris was negative-31 years old.
Video below courtesy of Raw Story:
Co-host Anna Koiman concludes: “Keep politics out of comic books.”
(All of this recalls the outrage of Evangelist Franklin Graham, who got indignant when Marvel introduced a gay superhero in its flagship title, X-Men, which has been an allegory for discrimination since its 1963 inception, so it kind of made sense that the story would include an LGBT character.)
I don’t regularly read superhero comics, but National Memo comics expert Eric Kleefeld informs me that Captain America’s latest move is part of a long and proud tradition of wedding politics to comic books: “The essence of Marvel Comics, going back to its glory days in the 1960s, has been morality tales with clearly liberal values,” he says.
ViaVulture
3. Ben Carson
The GOP presidential candidate and Twizzler-headed historical revisionist Dr. Ben Carson is second only to fellow political gatecrasher Donald Trump in the polls.
Luckily for him, he has secured the endorsement of God Almighty. This, according to Carson himself, speaking Tuesday on Marcus and Joni, which airs on evangelical Christian network Daystar.
As Carson tells it, he once thought the notion of a presidential run was ridiculous, but the clamoring for him to enter the ring kept building until at last he couldn’t ignore it, turned to God for guidance, and has been operating under His aegis and benefitting from His considerable influence ever since.
The political class and the pundits who said he couldn’t do it — “They don’t understand the power of God,” Carson said.
Carson has spoken of the primacy of his Christian faith to his campaign before. (His tax plan is based on the Bible, after all.) But his remarks that God is basically securing his campaign’s success sounds a tad myopic, considering he has stated that any presidential candidate would need to “swear to place our Constitution above their religion.”
Then again, that was in reference to remarks he had made that a Muslim shouldn’t be president. According to Carson anyone can sit in the Oval Office as long as their beliefs and practices fit within his narrowly circumscribed interpretation of what is “consistent with American culture.”
Would President Carson “place our Constitution above [his] religion,” or would he run his administration in deference to his Biggest Backer?
2. Rick Wiles
Rick Wiles snags a spot in TWIC for the second week in a row — for his claims that Bernie Sanders’ popularity is a herald of the End Times. His latest ravings weave a tapestry of far-right-wing anti-government paranoia and conservative Christian apocalyptic claptrap — and it all makes makes for some seriously unsettled verbal gumbo.
Per Right Wing Watch:
Wiles warned that leaders like Pope Francis, Al Gore and Bernie Sanders are part of a plan to “use global warming to impose global socialism” during which they will “take control of property, eliminate private property rights take control of natural resources.” Wiles said the purpose of this plan is to impose “a centralized global government controlling the activities of every human being on the planet. That’s what Al Gore and all those socialists are after, and they’re using the climate as the justification.”
Wiles also proposed that this is a sign of the second coming of Christ, “this is evidence of Jesus Christ coming back.” Harris offered that mass support for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign is also
evidence that the second coming is imminent.
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Wiles has been on a roll lately, claiming that Russia is some sort of newfound city on a hill and could be a refuge for conservative Americans once Obama’s mass slaughter begins.
1. Joe Miller
Joe Miller, the Tea Party darling who five short years ago was a Republican nominee for U.S. Senator from Alaska, spent a recent segment of his weekday radio show explicating a theory that transgender advocates were going to use magnets to alter the brain chemistry of Christians.
Along with his guest William Briggs (“Statistician to the stars!”), Miller was responding to a recent UCLA study, which, according to a release from the University of York, was designed to see if stimulating parts of the brain with transcranial magnets could influence participants’ ideologies — particularly their attitudes regarding religion and nationalism.
Per the release, investigators found that “both belief in God and prejudice towards immigrants can be reduced by directing magnetic energy into the brain.”
This of course led Briggs to worry aloud if eugenics was coming back into favor, even though, as Raw Story helpfully notes, genetics did not factor into the study at all: “It focused on an area of the brain and the effects of shutting it down temporarily.”
But Miller saw a more imminent threat posed by these findings: Transgender advocates could one day use magnets to zap the faith in God right out of Christians’ brains! Per Raw Story:
“The whole transgender crowd, they see their main opponent as being those of faith and so obviously they’re going to use any aggressive tactics they can to move forward that agenda,” Miller said
Some grist for Miller’s paranoia mill: The original design for the ARM processors present in all of our smartphones was developed by Sophie Wilson, an eminent computer scientist who happens to be transgender, and a luminary in the realm of mobile computing technology (which we put near our brains every day!). Maybe the best thing to do, Joe, is cancel your show and take what’s left of your un-magnetized brain off the grid before it’s too late.
ViaRaw Story
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Illustration: A Health Blog via Flickr
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