The "transgendered" myth, which has become incredibly popular on the right, apparently derives from a typo on a voter registration form. Of course, to a conspiracy-crazed right-winger, there are no accidents.
The "leftist activist" claim is pure hallucination...
The Times’ profile also identifies him as “generally conservative,” having been raised as a Baptist, but as someone who did not discuss politics much. According to his ex-wife, “he believed wholeheartedly in the Bible” and believed that abortion was wrong. He also distributed pamphlets criticizing President Obama to his neighbors in Colorado. On the voter registration form with the gender discrepancy, his party is listed as “UAF,” meaning unaffliated.Dear claimed that he was angry about "baby parts," an obvious reference to a right-wing video which falsely claims that Planned Parenthood profits from aborted fetus parts.
The right is also claiming that the Planned Parenthood attack was a bank robbery gone wrong. More bullshit. Dear shot up a Planned Parenthood center because he is a right-winger who hates abortion. Plain and simple.
Right-wing cowards refuse to admit the truth: Their beloved "alternative" media is a machine that emits clouds of psychotoxins. It is a machine designed to create capital-C Crazy. Occasionally, and unsurprisingly, those who suffer from long-term exposure to these psychotoxins will commit acts of violence. I think that it is fair to say that the manipulators who run the far-right media freak show bear no small measure of guilt when guys like Dear start firing bullets into the innocent. Similarly, Goebbels bore no small measure of guilt for the crimes of the Third Reich.
(Screw Godwin's Law. In this case, the historical reference is quite justified.)
Remember when...? Reactionaries are never more creative than when they feel compelled to convince themselves that mass killers are actually leftists, even though they almost always enter the crime scene from stage right.
They did so in the case of James Holmes, the Dark Knight killer, whom they immediately tagged as a representative of the Occupy Wall Street movement -- based on zero evidence. (Their reasoning, if we can even use that word, had something to do with the fact that Holmes was reported to have worn black. So did Zorro. So, for that matter, does Batman.)
There were attempts to portray Adam Lanza, the mentally ill Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter, as a "liberal." In reality, Lanza's mother was a conservative gun nut who irresponsibly made firearms available to her unhinged offspring -- and paid the price.
In 2011, the right-wing crazy-makers went to extraordinary lengths to convince the public that Jared Loughner -- the nutjob who shot Democratic congresswoman Giffords -- was a "leftist assassin." At the time, I tried to trace the origins of this canard. Here is what I wrote:
Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the Tucson shooting spree, the right wing media infrastructure quickly repackaged Jared Lee Loughner as a "leftist."In real life, Loughner had no discernible links to the left. Quite the opposite. He was a freak who adored an inane video called Zeitgeist (reviewed here). That bizarre conspiracy compendium somehow combines Jesus mythicism with 9/11 balderdash and what I would call "gonzo libertarian" economics. The controlled demolition theory of 9/11, highlighted in that film, was invented by right-wingers and is now most closely associated with Alex Jones -- who (as noted in our previous post) has become a functionary of the Republican Party.
"The hard left is going to try and silence the Tea Party movement by blaming us for this," Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips wrote. "The left is coming and will hit us hard on this. We need to push back harder with the simple truth. The shooter was a liberal lunatic. Emphasis on both words."This sentiment was not confined to a single nutjob -- it became the party line of the day throughout right-wingerland. From the New American:
Far from being a tool of the right, it appears as if Jared Loughner, the notorious mass murderer who killed six persons last week in Arizona, was schooled in a program hatched by that American terrorist par excellence, Bill Ayers. World Net Daily reports that Loughner was a student in one of Ayers' radical education projects. And the man who ran the program, WND adds, is "a former top communist activist who is an associate of Ayers."
Turns out, however, he went to a high school associated with radicals and communists — most notably, Ayers. The school program to which the high school was attached was funded by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, whose chairman at the time was Barack Obama...And so on. This has to be the loopiest conspiracy theory I've heard all month. Even someone as nutty as Jared Lee Loughner might have a hard time believing that Barack Obama somehow managed to turn Arizona high schools into communist training grounds.
Here's that ever-reliable propagandist for psychopathology, Jerome Corsi:
Jared Loughner, the alleged Arizona assassin, may have been inspired by the radical leftist punk-rock band Anti-Flag, one of his favorite bands, according to a schoolmate who posted on Twitter.com her reminiscences about her association with Loughner.By this logic, I must be an anti-Semite because I listen to Wagner. I must also be a neurotic Jew because I listen to Mahler.
Now looky here:
LOUGHNER - LEFTIST ASSASSIN - USED GLOCK 19
This useful article lists a number of mass killers whose motives can be traced, without any stretching of the evidence, to the consumption of right-wing media:
On Aug. 10, 1999 White supremacist Buford O. Furrow, Jr., fired 70 rounds with an Uzi-type submachine-gun inside the lobby of the Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, CA wounding three children, a teenage counselor and an office worker. He then carjacked a woman’s Toyota at gunpoint, dumped it behind a motel and murdered US Postal Worker Joseph Santos with a Glock 9mm handgun.Rightwingers, the time has come to face the facts: Your inflammatory media is both addictive and poisonous. Consumers of right-wing "news" spiral into ever-heightening levels of rage-gasm. They live for the high and constantly seek something stronger. The comments sections on right-wing sites are filled with deranged rhetoric -- violent, dehumanizing, eliminationist, fascistic. The proprietors of right-wing conspiracy sites make money by publishing incitements to mob violence.
On July 27, 2008 Former U.S. Army private, Jim David Atkinsson, who hated Democrats, liberals, African Americans and homosexuals, using a Remington Model 48 12-gauge shotgun, murdered two people and injured seven others inside the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, TN.
The day after Obama’s inauguration, white supremacist Keith Luke went on a killing spree in Brockton, Massachusetts. His goal was to kill as many Jews, blacks and Hispanics as possible. When questioned by investigators, the deranged gunman who had stockpiled hundreds of rounds of ammunition, proclaimed that he was fighting the extinction of the white race.
A little over a month later, Dannie Baker, a former Republican campaign volunteer shot five Chilean immigrants in Florida. Those who knew him said he was obsessed with the fear that illegal immigrants were taking over the country.
In April of 2009, Richard Popalowski, a white supremacist in Pittsburgh, shot and killed three police officers following a domestic disturbance call. He apparently thought that Obama was part of a government conspiracy to seize all guns, and he feared the government would take his guns away.
Later the same month, a Fort Walton Beach Florida man who thought the Obama administration was conspiring against him, shot and murdered two sheriff’s deputies.
On May 31, 2009 Dr. George Tiller was murdered in his own church by a right-wing “pro- life” gun man who decided to express his belief in the sanctity of human life by executing a medical doctor.
Eleven days later a right-wing white supremacist and Holocaust denier walked into the National Holocaust Museum and killed an African-American security guard. Two weeks later, three Neo-Nazis were arrested for bombing a diversity office in Scottsdale, Arizona.
On April 20, 2010 a member of the Sovereign Citizen movement was arrested after a failed attempt to take over a Tennessee county courthouse.
Exactly one month later, in West Memphis Arkansas, Sovereign citizens Jerry and Joe Kane murdered two police officers before they themselves were shot and killed in the ensuing shoot out with police.
On July 18, 2010 Byron Williams, an angry unemployed man, was arrested by police after they discovered a car full of weapons and ammunition that he had planned to use to kill progressives. He was on his way to the non-profit Tides Foundation Center, a favorite target of vitriol from Glenn Beck’s radio show.
On Jan. 8, 2011 22-year old Jared Lee Loughner killed six people, including a judge and a nine-year old child, and wounded 13 others, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), using a 9mm Glock 19 pistol during a public meeting in a supermarket parking lot near Tuscon, AZ.
On Aug. 5, 2012 Wade Michael Page, a 40-year old white supremacist and U.S. Army veteran murdered six people and wounded four others inside a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, WI with a Springfield XD(M) semi-automatic pistol.
Richard Dear and his fellow right-wing killers were the inevitable by-product of this sick subculture.
Right-wingers keep saying "Guns don't kill people" -- and you know what? They're right. Guns don't kill people: Right-wing conspiracy theories kill people. History teaches us that ideas do not always remain in the realm of the ideal, and that an incitement to violence can, in fact, beget violence.
7 comments:
It's remarkable how many police officers have been killed by white, right-wing freaks and yet the police still exhibit extreme paranoia over the presence of peaceful Occupy style protesters and of course, any and all black protesters.
I get the concept that every living thing should have a chance at "life". But it seems somewhat whacko for religious people to be so upset over the aborted progeny of sinners done by the sinners themselves. If the goal of any religion is to create a world of like-minded people, and it is, why do religious people get so upset when those who are not like minded are offing their own progeny?
It's all Bill Clinton's fault; everybody knows that. If he hadn't been so busy diddling Monica, none of this would have happened.
As the song says, guns don't kill people, rappers do. Sound of da police. Woo woo woo.
I remember the Buford Furrow thing, oddly. From back in the days when I read a conspiracy blog by a man calling himself nessie, although that was before the term "blog" was in common use. No-one claimed he was a leftist. Rather, the conspiracy theory there was that he had a military e-mail address and was working for some Defense Intelligence body. Oddly, he abandoned a van full of weapons, ammo, survivalist equipment and white supremacist literature so he could car jack some woman.
In the scheme of things, it's a pretty good operative frame for Cruz to play off the transgender angle and let the left defend. Clinton will even play off of that angle. And am sure Nixon said just as wacky things, as did Reagan. I hardly think this would qualify as a disqualification with +50% of the whackery that votes. I doubt Cruz will win, but he won't lose over this.
Before his fall, Josh Marshall wrote about Ted Cruz. He'd gone to the same university, knew people who knew Cruz as a student... Said that Ted Cruz is brilliant.
Ted Cruz knows exactly what he's doing and why he's doing it. And that's an even scarier thought than considering Cruz a wacko.
I'm not going to lie. I could use some links for seo purposes. On the bright side, you'll be helping save countless souls from months if not years of torment and poverty. Thanks.
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