Well, it had to happen sooner or later. And while I admit I have been lax in watching the nutty one of late, it seems that it is no beyond doubt that she has gone beyond the usual ranting about our Judeo-Christian heritage, the perfidy of the atheist left and how the Muslims will murder us all in our beds, and has erupted into outright conspiratoral lunacy.
Her drift has always been steadily downwards, towards this terminal stage, but perhaps not reading her every utterance has allowed me to see the dividing line between “slightly nutty” and “completely insane” more clearly.
My evidence is her article in the Spectator yesterday, who should probably be ashamed at publishing such tripe, or at least considering changing their name to “The Nick Griffin Survival Report.” It is also useful, in that it reflects the desperation of the right in the USA and its various overseas supporters, and highlights their underlying conspiratorial view of the world, which for so long has been focused on the doings of Muslims but has, once again, been directed internally.
We may as well start at the conclusion, since it is undoubtedly where Mel started here analysis from. In her words:
a Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so.
Yup. Its all there. Pretty much every major conspiracy theory that has been spread about Obama since the start of the election, barring the most famous one, and the recent insanity.
Needless to say, this is unmitigated garbage, on a par with John McCain being a Communist sleeper agent after brainwashing at the hands of the North Vietnamese. But it is prolific throughout the right wing blogosphere in the US, and often more than hinted at in national publications there. Overe here, on the other hand, these sort of theories only have currency among the BNP and other assorted fringe lunatics. Most of our Tories seem fairly content with an Obama victory, despite their short lived enthusiasm over Palin being added to the McCain ticket.
I am actually put in mind of many of the smears against Clinton that were made in the early 90s. Most of these came from the “Patriot” movement, and with a little digging one can still find lists and theories on old BBS’s and Usenet sites. More disturbingly, many of these theories were altered for a mainstream audience, then repeated by elements of the mass media in the US, especially by talk radio. Such theories include:
- The theory that Bill Clinton was involved in CIA drug smuggling in Mena, Arkansas
- That Bill Clinton was a serial rapist.
- That a large amount of people connected to Clinton had died in mysterious circumstances (aka the Clinton Death List).
- That Clinton was working with the United Nations to oversea the implementation of a New World Order, which would be dictatorial and run in the interest of ultra-rich elites
- That Clinton commanded a private assassination unit to deal with his political enemies
And a variety of much crazier theories involving Satanism, human sacrafice, the Illuminati, mind controlled sex-slaves and reptilian shapeshifting (the last being a personal favourite of mine).
There are curious parallels here. The theories are not the same of course, but they rely on the same mindset, and the same motivations. Sorting the useful idiots from the cynical propagandists would be a difficult, and possibly useless exercise.
The source for Mad Mel’s theories is the incredibly tiresome Stanley Kurtz, who far from being repressed, is a writer for Commentary, the National Review, Policy Review, the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal. Oh, and he is an adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
“Help! Help! I’m being repressed!”
Ahem. Anyway, the main evidence for Kurtz’s allegations is Obama and Ayers both serving on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a group involved in funding schools in Chicago. Interestingly, Kurtz neglects to mention many other members of the board and if they are also crazed terroristic socialists. Presumably because if one were to look at their political affiliations, they would find out that they were large contributors to the Republican Party, not least Walter Annenberg himself, the man who started this. Annenburg is a huge fanboi of Richard Nixon and Saint Ronald Reagan, which is far more damning than pretty much anything else involved in this pathetic excuse for a conspiracy theory.
Furthermore, the Challenge gave funding to about, oh, half of all the public schools in Chicago. I would be surprised if some teachers with a radical viewpoint of any sort did not get some funding. To believe Mad Mel and Kurtz, one would have to either belief that a foundation founded by Walter Annenburg and staffed by Republican donors was objectively pro-Marxist, or that there are a hell of a lot of Black Supremacist teachers in Chicago. And knowing those two, they could be implying either.
I wont even get into the Mafia bullshit. Suffice to say, according to Mad Mel, if someone who knows Obama knows some dodgy people, it is a clear connection between the two and it is obvious they support each other implicity and share their worldview (because as we know, black seprartists, Marxists and the Mafia get along like peas in a pod). Presumably Melanie is unaware of the concept of Six Degrees of Separation, or how many more people a lawyer, University professor and politician may deal with when compared to the average person.
It would seem that in the face of an Obama victory, the most outspoken of President Bush’s supporters are regressing to the paranoid, bien pensant anti-authoritarianism and distrust of Federal power that marked the Clinton years, even those removed or opposed to the culture in which such a movement or style of thought originated (namely depression in the Mid-West, coupled with a religious revival and long Democratic dominance of Congress). One can expect such antics from a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity, however it seems very out of place in British political commentary.
Gavin M at Sadly, No! suggests that such thinking is now a general trend among the wingnut crowd. As he points out in this interesting article about the return to 90s style rhetoric from the US right:
an Obama presidency will yield us a bounty of delicious 180-degree reversals, hanging contradictions, forehead-smacking discontinuities, and flaming self-pwnages from our wingnut pals, as their entire political edifice turns heliotropically to face the warming light of the new Hated Thing.
Glenn Greenwald has also noticed this trend, via a strange article from Malkin’s Hot Air:
The same people who cheered all of that on are now parading around proclaiming that “that America exists precisely because of our desire to rein in government and make it accountable to the people” and “only in a panic, in which Congressional leadership abdicates its role to keep executive power in check, would any American Congress agree to surrender its Constitutional mandate for oversight” and invoking the tyrannical specter of Britain’s King George, who didn’t even possess some of the powers that they insisted on vesting in their own contemporaneous King George.
The spectre of a totalitarian, Obama headed government, filled to the brim with radicals and Mafia men and angry ranting black preachers, is the laughable vision of tomorrow that the wingnut crowd fear the most. It would almost be sad, if it were not so amusing.
Mad Mel’s comments are worth a read, too. Anyone who tries to interject a modicum of sense into the discussion is predictably labelled a troll and a moobat. In fact, the most common disagreement seems not to be with Mel’s lunacy, but the idea that Obama will win. Cynicor, however, sums it up perfectly:
This frothing, unsupported article, and most of the comments below, bear no relation to the election contest that’s actually happening here in the States right now.
The PFLD 