re: #78 The Ghost of a Flea

The nationalist right, has always dwelled in the realm of conspiracy theories and broad-stroked illogic. When the doors got truly flung open for that stuff to be mainstream, to be part of big-stage politics, they reasserted themselves. Lots of the conspiracy theories floated by the wingnuts—Gingrich pseudo-intellectual edition, Tea Party, or whatever the Trump-Lumpas are—derive their structure and content from old-school racist and anti-semitic materials. That people have worked backwards (thanks, internet!) and found the original materials, and found the original materials appealing, should not be surprising.

Most of the Islamic nonsense is reworked versions of blood libel and claims made about Jews. Those that evoke “political correctness” and “Cultural Marxism” are a barely-disguised rehash of JBS materials, which are a rehash of Kulturbolschewismus, which is rehash with minor variations of the fucking Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Those that evoke “world government” and/or “international banking” also pull from JBS materials, who got it from…the kind of people so scared of Communism (and The Wrong Kind of Jew) that they thought the Nazis had a point.

Nazis and wannabe-Nazis cropping up shouldn’t be shocking to anyone. The US right wing has been using more and more ingredients from the “ethnic nationalist” aisle of the supermarket.

Southern Strategy. “State’s rights” as dogwhistle. Motherfucking welfare queens and young bucks driving Cadillacs and eating t-bone steaks. “Political correctness” as AM radio subject. The entire ethnocentric, foreigner-hating demimonde of US apocalypse-prophecying Christianity becoming more and more a part of everyday political engagement. The simultaneously demand for and hate of cheap Latin American labor. Glenn Beck. Alex Jones. 95% by weight of FOX pundits’ output. Birtherism.

There are people who’ve been raised on all the above. Why be shocked that they noticed the pattern match between the old material and the new?

But instead of noticing the pattern that both are bogus, they think both are true.