Justin's Political Corner
Conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones explained to his audience today how the government could have been behind the devastating May 20 tornado in Oklahoma.
On the May 21 edition of The Alex Jones Show, a caller asked Jones whether he was planning to cover how government technology may be behind a recent spate of sinkholes. After laying out how insurance companies use weather modification to avoid having to pay ski resorts for lack of snow, Jones said that “of course there’s weather weapon stuff going on — we had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force.”
Following a long tangent, Jones returned to the caller’s subject. While he explained that “natural tornadoes” do exist and that he’s not sure if a government ”weather weapon” was involved in the Oklahoma disaster, Jones warned nonetheless that the government “can create and steer groups of tornadoes.”
According to Jones, this possibility hinges on whether people spotted helicopters and small aircraft “in and around the clouds, spraying and doing things.” He added, “if you saw that, you better bet your bottom dollar they did this, but who knows if they did. You know, that’s the thing, we don’t know.”
In April, Jones garnered attention for labeling the Boston Marathon bombings a “false flag” event staged by the U.S. government. Over the years, Jones has endorsed a wide array of paranoid conspiracies, including alleging that the U.S. government carried out or was somehow involved in the 9-11 attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, and recent mass shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary school and the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.
On Wednesday night, Minnesota State Representative Glenn Gruenhagen (R-Glencoe) took to the House floor to talk about climate change and renewable energy.
Using sources such as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Gruenhagen told his colleagues that climate change is a “complete United Nations fraud and lie…. The latest facts from CPAC show that in the last sixteen years there’s been no global warming.”
While it is common practice among climate skeptics to claim that the Earth is no longer warming, the fact is global temperatures are rising. 2010 was the hottest year on record and every year of the 2000s was warmer than1990s average. Over 30 million people were displaced by climate-related extreme weather events in 2012, and it is increasingly likely millions more will be displaced in the near future.
Indeed, Minnesota residents are feeling the very real impacts of climate change. The MinnPostreports that three 1,000 year floods have occurred in the state in the last eight years as a result of shifts in rainfall patterns. Extreme drought is occurring not just in Minnesota but almost every state, and climate change is having cumulative stress on the Great Lakes. Rising levels of water vapor in the warming atmosphere are spiking heat indexes and associated health warnings.
Gruenhagen aside, the majority of lawmakers in Minnesota have recognized the importance of enacting policies to address climate change and in 2007, implemented one of the highestrenewable energy standards in the nation – laws which require electric utilities companies to produce a portion of their electricity from wind, solar, and other renewable sources. Indeed, Minnesota ranks seventh in the nation in overall wind energy capacity and lawmakers in the state recently agreed to a solar energy standard.
h/t: Climate Progress
The American Family Association announced yesterday that it has parted ways with Buster Wilson, the host of AFA Today and the general manager of its radio network. Wilson says he will continue to write for his personal blog.
Certainly Wilson isn’t leaving because he is too extreme (see: Fischer, Bryan) or vacuous (see: Wildmon, Tim) for the AFA, but we are going to miss him in particular because we have always appreciated Wilson’s tendency to respond to nearly every single Right Wing Watch post about him and even completely make up things we’ve said.
But most of all we really enjoyed watching him conclude many of his conspiratorial rants with the phrase, “I’m just asking the question.”
Since Wilson is a member of the extremist Oath Keepers, we were not surprised to see him push several anti-government conspiracy theories, wonder about the existence of FEMA concentration camps and assert that he was “staying neutral” on the matter of whether it is appropriate to shoot U.S. Marshals. He also maintained that the government was going to classify Christians as mentally ill in order to “get us out of the picture,”confiscate the guns of conservative Christians and ban celebrations of Christmas. Furthermore, he has promoted the birther conspiracy theory and posted a hoax photo of President Obama’s “foreign student ID.”
Wilson has also been no friend of the gay community. He warned that gay men are bent on molesting Boy Scouts, linked the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell to an increase in the military’s suicide rate, warned that legalizing gay marriage will lead to dog, building and automobile marriages and blamed Hurricane Isaac on an LGBT festival. At one point, Wilson even floated a boycott of Google over the company’s strong stance in support of gay rights.
h/t: Right Wing Watch
This morning, the National Review broke the news that tea party Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is considering a presidential run, a scoop that should surprise no one who’s paid attention to his short Senate career. As Jonathan Bernstein explains, Cruz has spent his few months in the Senate alienating his colleagues by constantly trying to distinguish himself as the more-conservative-than-thou alternative to “establishment” Republicans. Such behavior makes no sense if Cruz is interested in building the coalitions necessary to legislate, but it makes perfect sense if he has his eyes set on winning a tea-soaked GOP primary in 2016.
Here are five examples of such theories that Cruz actually believes in:
- George Soros leads a global conspiracy to abolish the game of golf. In a January 2012 article published on Cruz’s senate campaign website, the future senator argues that a twenty year-old non-binding United Nations resolution signed by 178 nations including the United States under President George H.W. Bush, is actually a nefarious plot to “abolish ‘unsustainable’ environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads.” Cruz attributes this plot to a common tea party boogieman — “[t]he originator of this grand scheme is George Soros, who candidly supports socialism and believes that global development must progress through eliminating national sovereignty and private property.”
- Communists infiltrated Harvard Law School. Almost three years ago, Cruz gave a speech to the tea party group Americans for Prosperity in which he claimed that revolutionary communists were a major presence on Harvard’s law faculty. According to Cruz, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.” Cruz’s claims came as a big surprise to Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried, a Republican who served as President Reagan’s solicitor general, who says that “I would be surprised if there were any members of the faculty who ‘believed in the Communists overthrowing the U.S. government.’”
- Islamic law threatens the United States. Echoing a common fear among very conservative politicians that Sharia law is somehow creeping into American life, Cruz told a senate candidate’s forum last year that “Sharia law is an enormous problem” in the United States. In reality, there are barely any examples of Islamic or Sharia law even being mentioned in American legal proceedings, and when it is mentioned it is typically because a contract, will or other document drafted by a private citizen invokes Sharia law, not because the court wishes to replace American law with something else.
- Obama wants the immigration bill to fail so he can campaign on it in 2016. Cruz claims that “the reason that the White House is insisting on a path to citizenship” in the immigration bill making its way through Congress “is because the White House knows that insisting on that is very likely to scuttle the bill” giving Obama an issue to campaign on in 2014 and 2016. In reality, a path to citizenship was a key prong of the immigration bill President Bush supported in 2007. It’s also a major prong of the Gang of Eight bill — agang which includes Republican Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ). So if the path to citizenship is actually an Obama plot to give himself a campaign issue, Obama has some unexpected co-conspirators in this scheme.
- George W. Bush led an assault on Texas’ “sovereignty.” Cruz’s first campaign ad touted his victory in a Supreme Court case permitting the state of Texas to execute a Mexican national, despite the fact that Texas violated America’s treaty obligations by not permitting this Mexican citizen “to request assistance from the consul of his own state.” President Bush objected to Texas’s effort to flout a treaty that even North Korea had honored when it detained two American journalists for five months in 2009. Cruz dismissed Bush’s objections as an intrusion on “the sovereignty of the States.”
If elected to the White House, Cruz is unlikely to step back from his penchant for Glenn Beck-style conspiracies.
Ohio Republican congressman Jim Jordan is joining Sen. Jim Inhofe in endorsing the conspiracy theory that the government is buying up bullets in order to limit their availability to gun owners during an interview yesterday with Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, who was the guest host on Sandy Rios In The Morning.
During the program, Perkins praised people for “buying bricks of ammo” and “buying gold” — even though the price of gold is collapsing — adding that he is “buying my kids ammo instead of saving bonds.” Jordan said that “Americans rightly understand that freedom is under attack in this country,” specifically religious liberty and the Second Amendment.
Jordan agreed with Perkins’ contention that the Department of Homeland Security is “hoarding ammunition” as a “way for the President to keep Americans from having ammo by having the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies buy it all up” and commended Americans for “purchasing a record level of firearms and ammunition.”
From the 04.29.2013 edition of AFR’s Sandy Rios In The Morning:
h/t: Right Wing Watch
Two Republican members of Congress introduced legislation on Friday that would limit the amount of ammunition the government is able to purchase at a given time. The bill is a response to far-right conspiracy theories that the government is “stockpiling” ammunition, either to wage a war against the American people or to dry up the ammunition market so average citizens can’t buy bullets.
Rep. Frank Lucas (R-OK), and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) will put forth the Ammunition Management for More Obtainability Act (or, AMMO) Act in both the House and Senate. The bill would require executive branch agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to maintain ammunition levels below the average monthly amounts that the agencies had before Obama took office.
Last week, another Republican representative, Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) brought up the “stockpiling” conspiracy in a hearing with DHS Sec. Janet Napolitano, who said it was “inherently unbelievable that those statements would be made.”
The theory comes from fringe websites like Alex Jones’s Infowars, but have been given a platform by Drudge, a site that commonly peddles unfounded conspiracy theories. Even some far-right sites have taken it upon themselves to debunk the claim that DHS is “stockpiling” weapons. Brietbart.com described the theories as “based more on panic than fact.”
What is making the right-wing mouthpieces angry today? It is the fact that the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)’s website was blocked on some military bases.
The website for the Southern Baptist Convention has been blocked from some US Army computers.That’s caused some conservative activists to accuse the Pentagon of being hostile to religion.
Ties between conservative evangelicals and the military have been strong in the past. But the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and other recent incidents have strained those ties.
A Southern Baptist spokesman said that he spoke to Army officials who confirmed that some computers have blocked access to SBC.Net
Those officials say the problem is a glitch, said Roger “Sing” Oldham, convention spokesman.
Even SBC spokesman Sing Oldham admits the the site’s blocking as accidental, but according to the conservative minsinformation chamber, the incident was viewed as “sinister,” “anti-Christian,” and even “pandering to Islamists.”
Right-Wing Reactions:
Todd Starnes, Fixed Noise Radio:
The U.S. Military has blocked access to the Southern Baptist Convention’s website on an unknown number of military bases because it contains “hostile content” — just weeks after an Army briefing labeled Evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics as examples of religious extremism, Fox News has learned.The censorship was made public after an Army officer tried to log onto the denomination’s website and instead — received a warning message.
“The site you have requested has been blocked by Team CONUS (C-TNOSC/RCERT-CONUS) due to hostile content,” the message read.
Team CONUS protects the computer network of the Dept. of Defense. The SBC’s website was not blocked at the Pentagon.
It’s unclear what the “hostile content” might have been. The SBC is pro-life and opposed to same-sex marriage.
Bryan Fischer, host of AFA Radio’s Focal Point:
Bryan Fischer has produced the latest anti-Christian conspiracy theory and of course rather than do any research, rather than do anything as simple as picking up the phone or sending an email, he’s decided to go on the air to tell his million or so listeners about this latest “attack” on their religious rights by their government.In this video, below, Fischer explains that he has “breaking news,” that the U.S. government is blocking access from military or government personnel to the Southern Baptist Convention’s homepage. The SBC is the nation’s second-largest Christian group, after Roman Catholics, and they boast about 16 million members, or about five percent of the nation’s population.
By the end of the video clip, Fischer has convinced himself that this seems like a vast government conspiracy to label the Southern Baptist Convention a “hate group,” making the giant leap from “hostile content” to “hate group.”
“Basically, the U.S. military has classified the Southern Baptist Convention as a hate group — the entire denomination,” Fischer repeatedly cries, adding, “it’s like porn.”
Lucianne Goldberg, founder of Lucianne.com:
Was access to Islamic radical websites also blocked? I would sure be more concerned about that! The DOD is working diligently to investigate what might be causing access issues. Uh huh.
This is just another example of the Christian faith coming under attack in the military. Earlier this month, an Army email listed prominent Christian ministries like the Family Research Council and American Family Association as “domestic hate groups.”
FreeRepublic:
Here are some of the more out there comments on that site:
Actually, it seems that some U.S. Army officers are hostile to the Southern Baptist Convention. - righttackle44Muslims good, Christians bad. - E. Pluribus Unum
Military chaplains and bibles in the foxhole have a long history. Now because sodomites are celebrated by a corrupt culture, sin has been redefined by the government. That is still prohibited by the First Amendment. - a fool in paradise
but not a negative word about Islam.
Time for Christians and conservatives to not join the military and to advise their relatives not to. - GeronL
They’re getting this information from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). A very far Left Wing outfit that labels any and everything conservative a hate group. The SPLC is now a traning contractor for the US government.
Originally hired by “Big Sis” Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, who claimed military veterans were potential terrorists deemed watching by DHS, the SPLC is now training the entire FedGov.
Write your Congressman! The SPLC contract HAS TO GO! - Alas Babylon!
The comments on that page are what you would expect— blaming it on Muslims, gays, liberals, Obama, et al.
Ken Kluklowski at Breitbart.com’s Big Government:
Lt. Col. Damien Pickart insists the Pentagon is not intentionally blocking access for Southern Baptists but has not provided any official explanation for the multiple reports of the military blocking access to Southern Baptist material. On its face, this looks like a brazen show of hostility by the Obama administration against devout Christians in the U.S. military.
Breitbart News legal columnist Ken Klukowski is senior fellow for religious liberty at the Family Research Council.
Today on AFR’s Focal Point, Bryan Fischer hosted Todd Starnes on this topic. As expected, it’s full of complaining that “Muslims have more rights than [Conservative] Christians in this country” crap.
The right will continue to declare this an “intentional sabotage of our Christian freedoms,” but the fact is this: the Southern Baptist Convention’s website getting blocked is more likely to be a glitch. Flip the story for a second: If it was Planned Parenthood, Media Matters, Alternet, pro-LGBTQ sites, or this very site getting blocked on the bases, the right would cheer it.
A Republican state representative in New Hampshire posted a video by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Facebook last week suggesting the Boston marathon bombing was a “false flag” operation carried out by the US government.
Rep. Stella Tremblay (R), a member of the state’s 400-person House of Representatives, posted the video on Glenn Beck’s Facebook page on April 19 with an accompanying message:
Just as you said would happen. Top Down, Bottom UP. The Boston Marathon was a Black Ops “terrorist” attack. One suspect killed, the other one will be too before they even have a chance to speak. Drones and now “terrorist” attacks by our own Government. Sad day, but a “wake up” to all of us. First there was a “suspect” then there wasnt. Infowars broke the story and they knew they had been “found out”
Reached by phone, Tremblay told the local Foster’s Daily Democrat that she had suspicions of some kind of plot involving Secretary of State John Kerry, Saudi nationals, and “black ops” soldiers at the scene of the marathon. Several of these elements have popped up both in Jones’ work and various Internet fever swamps since the bombing.
Tremblay has a history of spreading conspiracy theories. Last year she e-mailed out a video claiming President Obama was not a citizen, according to the Huffington Post, promptiong a Democratic colleague to label her “an embarassment to us as a chamber.”
The state’s Democratic Party condemned her latest episode on Tuesday.
“[E]ven for the New Hampshire Republican Party, which has become synonymous with the Tea Party and radical extremism, Representative Tremblay’s claims are a new low,” New Hampshire Democratic Party Communication Director Harrell Kirstein said in a statement.
h/t: TPM LiveWire
On Friday, Glenn Beck vowed that, beginning today, he would reveal the government’s cover-up of a Saudi Arabian connection to last week’s Boston Marathon bombing. True to his word, most of his radio program today has been dedicated to laying out his case, but rather than try to edit down and synthesize Beck’s explanation of the conspiracy that is supposedly afoot, we’ll let The Blaze do it.
In short, Beck is convinced, despite reports to the contrary, that this Saudi national is an al Qaeda operative who successfully recruited the Tsarnaev brothers to carry out the Boston bombing and now the government is engaged in a massive disinformation campaign in an effort to cover it up.
From the 04.22.2013 edition of TheBlazeTV’s The Glenn Beck Program:
H/T: Right Wing Watch
It sounds like a headline from The Onion, but it’s not.
The reasoning for this bill makes it sound even more like something that is parody - it’s an anti-agenda 21 bill, the right seems to think agenda 21 is a conspiracy to undermine property rights and american sovereignty.
Never mind the fact that implementation of agenda 21 is completely voluntary and non-binding …
Bill No. 2366 would ban all state and municipal funds for anything related to “sustainable development,” which it defines as: “development in which resource use aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come.”
(via questionall)
Presenting the next great conservative conspiracy: Obama, ALEC, the UN, Rupert Murdoch, Bill & Melinda Gates, and Jeb Bush (!) are coming for your kids.
Last week, conservative talk show host and media mogul Glenn Beck decided to let his listeners in on what he dubbed “the biggest story in American history.” It’s called System X. “If you don’t stop it,” he warned, “American history is over as you know it.”
As Beck explained it, a little-known Department of Education program, supported by rich philanthropists, business interests, and the United Nations, was turning public schools into the world’s next great data-mining frontier. Using carrots offered up in the 2009 stimulus bill, the federal government and its contractors could compile hundreds of points of data on your kids and use it for who knows what. The result: “System X: a government run by a single party in control of labor, media, education, and banking; joined by big business to further their mutual collective goals.”
Beck’s not the only person fighting Common Core. Lawmakers in 18 states have considered legislation to block the implementation of the curriculum standards. Five—Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia—have successfully rejected or partially rejected Common Core. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell reiterated his opposition to Common Core in late March, just one week after Texas Gov. Rick Perry went on Beck’s program to denounce it.
On the most basic level, the fight over Common Core is same fight parents and policymakers have been waging over public education for the last century, centering on two basic questions: What is the appropriate level of federal involvement in local schooling? And if we did settle on an umbrella curriculum, what should it actually look like? Education reformer Diane Ravitch, for one, opposes Common Core on the grounds that, while there should be a set of national education tenets, she believes “such standards should be voluntary, not imposed by the federal government.”
But in the hands of activists like Beck, Common Core has taken on a more ominous tone. The long-standing fever swamp fears of enforced secularism and multiculturalism, like those promoted by now-Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) in the 1990s, have been given a digital makeover.
The core itself is what it sounds like—a broad curriculum standard. States that choose to accept Common Core gain access to a pot of billions of federal dollars. Social conservatives have never liked that kind of incentive game, especially when it’s connected to a Democratic president. (GOP Rep. Rob Bishop, whose Utah district is ground zero for the anti-Common Core movement, called the Common Core a “hook” from which the state could never extricate itself.)
According to its critics, the most nefarious consequence of Common Core is a data collection program that’s part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus). The idea is to better track student demographic and achievement data to figure out what’s working and what’s not, and respond accordingly. Some of the biggest names in American politics and business support the idea. In 2011, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation teamed up with the Carnegie Foundation and an educational subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. to develop a database of student data that states can access for free until 2015. (After that it will charge an annual fee.) At a speech at the White House last November, Shawn T. Bay, CEO of the education data company eScholar, called Common Core “the glue that actually ties everything together” in the Department of Education’s Big Data push.
For now, most GOP lawmakers’ concerns about the Common Core focus on the curriculum and the idea of federal control, not Big Data. But the Obama administration is wary of Common Core taking on a life of its own in the conservative fever swamps.
Americans love conspiracy theories, and a new poll shows how far-fetched some of these beliefs are. About 13 percent of Americans believe Obama is the anti-Christ, nearly 30 percent believe in aliens and four percent believe lizard people control the US.
With anyone else, you’d probably think this is a joke. But Jim Hoft, the legendary Dumbest Man on the Internet, is not kidding. He honestly believes that President Obama is causing long lines at Reagan Airport, just to hassle people like him.
Paranoid right wing derangement, combined with epic stupidity. An award-winning combination!
Thug in Chief is screwing w #cpac13 conservatives at Reagan airport- long long security lines twitter.com/gatewaypundit/…
— Jim Hoft (@gatewaypundit) March 17, 2013
Rep. Louie Gohmert: The sequester an Obama conspiracy to fund ‘ACORN-like groups’ (via Raw Story )
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) suggested Wednesday the sequester was a conspiracy by President Barack Obama to cut defense spending and raise money for community organizing groups. Speaking on the House floor, Gohmert said the timing of Obama’s meeting with congressional leaders over the sequester was…
