There’s water on Mars! Not to mention a nefarious evil liberal agenda. There’s a new Red Scare coming, America. Are you ready for it?
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. Rick Santorum
Martin Luther King, Jr. isn’t here to tell us where he would have stood on marriage equality. Luckily for us, conservative Republicans have been only too willing to invoke the late reverend’s name and character in the cause of “religious liberty.”
“Religious liberty,” of course, being the gloss right-wing politicians and pundits have tried to put on the privilege of florists, bakers, and — most controversially — government officials to discriminate against same-sex couples under the aegis of the First Amendment right to practice their religion.
(Recall that Glenn Beck notably bragged that he was going to become the MLK of fighting marriage equality. So brave.)
Perhaps noting that his poll numbers were scraping rock bottom, former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum thought he’d get in on the game. A few weeks ago, shortly before the last GOP debate, Santorum appeared on the program Marcus and Joni (which airs on the Christian television network Daystar), and drew comparisons between Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who went to jail rather than let a gay couple get married on her watch, and — yes — MLK.
It’s possible that one reason Santorum is polling so low right now (0.5 percent right according to Real Clear Politics) is not that he fails to rattle off the conservative talking points — specious comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, ignorance of the concept of judicial review, a willful misunderstanding of civil liberties as they apply to LGBT people — it’s that he’s so damn boring when he does it.
Take a double dose of Red Bull, scaffold your eyelids open, and behold SantorumBot 3000 process moldy right-wing analogies to Nuremberg and civil rights leaders of the past, not to mention a tasteless invocation of the Columbine shooting (Kim Davis is like the girl who was killed because she believed in God, Santorum had said, except that isn’t what happened).
Per Right Wing Watch:
Santorum defended Davis, claiming that she should be “applauded” for her “courageous” actions and asserting that the Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage is illegitimate since it violates biblical precepts.
“Clearly, the laws on marriage don’t follow the natural law, they don’t follow God’s law, so in Martin Luther King’s viewpoint, he would have said that this is a law that you have an obligation to resist and that’s what Kim Davis is doing,” he said. “She is standing up and saying, ‘I am not going to follow an unjust law.’”
Let us give thanks to far-right ideologues like Santorum: As long as they are on hand to tell us what Martin Luther King, Jr. would have said and done, it’s almost like he’s still with us. Thank you, senator.
4. Donna Hearne
Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old high-schooler who reassembled a digital clock in a pencil case and was arrested for his trouble, has become a flashpoint for conservative cranks who believe that the boy’s arrest and the subsequent backlash against the Irving, Texas police force and school officials responsible have all been part of a big fraud. Some theories are more elaborate than others.
Enter Donna Hearne, executive director of the Constitutional Coalition, whose mission is to educate “others to understand and know our Constitution, acknowledging absolutes as the basis for our laws and God as the giver of freedom, and researching issues through the lens of the Constitution.”
Hearne is a former Reagan appointee to the U.S. Department of Education, and is now an outspoken advocate against the Common Core — and when I say “outspoken,” I mean Hearne sees the Common Core as nothing less than a “long war” waged by “the progressive, autocratic elite to completely transfer all decisions concerning children from parents, teachers and school boards to themselves, and to completely transform America from a nation of responsible, moral, independent human beings endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to robots and servants of the state.”
Hearne, blogging in the Conservative Pundit Tuesday, said that liberals’ outpouring of support for Mohamed and condemnation of comments critical of Muslims, such of those of presidential candidate Ben Carson, is entirely misplaced:
Did the school board, the Irving police and Dr. Carson understand American’s founding principles as spelled out in the Declaration of Independence that there are certain truths that come from the Judeo-Christian God such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that government is to secure these rights? Did they understand some of the basic tenants of Sharia law: Sharia trumps the Constitution? Sharia law condones female genital mutilation, honor killing, amputation, crucifixion, beheadings (all anti-life) and NO opposition voices or freedom of speech? Did they know that 51 percent of U.S. Muslims want Sharia law and of that 25 percent are okay with violence against Americans?
Whoa. If you think Hearne’s little sashay from discussing a teenage tinkerer in Texas to female genital mutilation (all in one paragraph) is a bit much, just wait. In distressingly quick fashion, she segues from the New York City school board’s decision to close schools for Muslim holidays to an Islamic plot to turn the U.S. into a “totalitarian slave camp.”
Just as quickly, she doubles back to her bête noire: the Common Core, which has undermined America by failing to teach children about their own heritage (“America’s Judeo-Christian foundations” and so forth) as well as the “dangers of civilization jihad.”
“Uninformed and ignorant citizens become slaves of the state,” Hearnes concludes. Her new self-published book is out now.
3. Michael Savage
Michael Savage would like educated Catholics to take a good long look at this pope fella, or as he calls him, the “atheist” who “genuflects.” It seems like Savage is going to go off on a mirthless riff off a Seinfeld routine (“What’s the deal with the pontiff, huh?”), but it turns out this is just the opening salvo in Savage’s weekly performance of metastatic indignation — where each outrage feeds a new, unrelated outrage — each more nonsensical than the last.
No, the real target of Savage’s ire on his Savage Nation show last week was presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the “liberal weasel Jew.”
“Everything about him sets off comedic shockwaves in me,” Savage says, identifying Sanders with the type of “atheist Jew” he has avoided all his life. “They hated America. They hated Christians. I know the type. I ran from them. They made me sick.”
He further accuses Sanders of being “a running dog of the Hillary Clinton camp,” a “warmup act,” because his progressive “nonsense” makes her look like a centrist by comparison.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/226309439″ params=”color=ff5500″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
This is all pretty tame, considering just a few weeks ago, Savage likened Pope Francis and Sanders to the Cambodian genocidal dictator Pol Pot. Savage claimed that the reforms they suggested would turn “street thugs in Baltimore” into a homegrown Khmer Rouge.
Sanders, he said, would end up “giving them a gun and a badge, telling them to go out and round up anybody with eyeglasses, and call them the enemy of the state and put them into internment camps, work camps, and they wound up with a mountain of skulls. […] That’s where this rhetoric leads, don’t you understand that?”
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/224174261″ params=”color=ff5500″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
That Savage — what a sensible fellow.
Via Right Wing Watch
2. Rush Limbaugh
If you are Rush Limbaugh, the velcro-voiced lout of the airwaves, the stunning announcement from NASA this week that there is flowing water on the surface of Mars is really just there to remind you of all the irksome, terrifying forces gathering to smother your way of life.
These include: the nefarious liberal agenda to foist phony climate change science upon the American public, the corrupting influence of President Obama on absolutely everything he touches, and the insidious Muslim plot to control and co-opt every branch of government — including those concerned with exploring space.
According to Limbaugh, the revelation of briny streams on the Martian surface was just an excuse for so-called “scientists” to trot out their theories about how Mars’ arid, lifeless surface is possibly attributable to an environmental calamity in the Red Planet’s past.
“I’m sorry folks, but that’s not science,” Limbaugh insists, shutting the experts down, “and that’s not even a good wild guess. How can there be a catastrophic event on Mars when there is nobody there to experience the catastrophe? How can there be a catastrophe on Mars when we can’t even prove it? All we can do is wild guess it?”
(This is the same limp canard creationists and climate change deniers wheel out when they want to dismiss the overwhelming body of geological, radiological, and biological evidence. Nobody was there, and so it can’t be known what happened. Talking snakes, on the other hand… but I digress.)
Limbaugh’s asinine aria (courtesy of some courageous transcribing from Media Matters) continues:
NASA wants to go to Mars. And Obama has turned NASA over to Muslim outreach, in case you’ve forgotten. NASA wants the money to go to Mars. It makes total sense in the world that they would time, NASA, the release of, “Look what we found! We found flowing water on Mars! On my god. there could be life! On my god, we gotta go we gotta go!” And here comes the movie [Ridley Scott’s new sci-fi film, The Martian]. They throw in climate change relationships just for a little dot the I, cross the T, and magic happens.
[…] NASA’s been converted to Muslim outreach. They want to go back to Mars. Hell, that’s fine. I mean, I’m not opposed to going to Mars. I’m big on exploring. The problem — everything that Obama touches has been corrupted and by corrupted, I mean converted to liberalism. Everything that exists here exists for the purpose of advancing the Obama agenda.
If Limbaugh really wants to go to exploring Mars, perhaps the Islamic-Obama-Space consortium can arrange a one-way ticket.
1. Alex Jones
I think it’s safe to say nobody would ever turn to Alex Jones, the prolific conspiracy monger, for an insightful, rational take on the day’s events. This is the same man, after all, who fanned the flames on the mass delusion that a military training exercise was some kind of federal plot to conquer Texas. Jones, the country’s most reliably prodigious paranoiac, has also been one of the loudest proponents of the “theory” that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was staged. So I think it’s reasonable to assume that nobody listens to this crank. (Oh wait, never mind. Jones’ website got 8.5 million visitors last month.)
Anyway, the bombastic Jones recently cooked up a video that Addicting Info suggests is “easily the most batsh*t crazy” segment the InfoWars host has ever produced, which is no small claim.
Using Salon‘s controversial decision to publish an op-ed by an admitted pedophile as a peg, Jones weaves together his most inspired conspiracy tapestry yet, threading together a “greatest hits” of our nation’s pet paranoias into an elaborate Grand Unified Big Bad Government Theory.
Jones really gets the band back together here: disease-causing vaccines, defense contractors that feed on children’s brains, Jerry Sandusky, transgender bathrooms, the pope (whom The Big Evil State has apparently blackmailed), the sale of baby body parts, public human sacrifices perpetrated by (who else?) the United Nations, “trendy” liberals, the welfare state, death panels, “torture and necrophilia dungeons,” — it’s all part of “an act of domination, an act of control” perpetrated by what he calls the Pot Bellied Pedophile Network (PBP).
The fact that Jones spends the segment wearing a clown mask and blood soaked gloves, speaking in an occasionally incomprehensible voice pretending to be a serial killer in charge of the PBP, is the most reasonable thing in evidence here.
“We’re not just gonna sexually abuse your children,” Jones growls in his masked-clown-as-Big-Evil-State persona, “We’re gonna forcibly inoculate them with deadly pathogens known to brain-damage ’em. We’re gonna rape their brains, rape their minds, and make you take care of em for decades. […] Because that’s what we like to do. And you’re so weak and pathetic you’ll do whatever you tell you.”
“Crawl in your hole and die. The Earth belongs to us,” he concludes. “Your children belong to us now. Submit to the New World Order. Submit to liberalism. Submit to trendiness. Give us full control!” And he signs off with a maniacal laugh.
Via Addicting Info
—
Illustration: Marxist Mars (National Memo)
Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!
Get This Week In Crazy delivered to your inbox every Friday, by signing up for our daily email newsletter.
