The American Political Right Descends into Insanity

Protesters listen during a rally against face
masks being required in schools (Rick Egan/AP).

Once upon a time, certainly while I was growing up and during my period as a Republican city committee member, the Republican Party valued education, respected science and knowledge and was epitomized by "country club Republicans."  Now, it is the party of  ignorance, insane conspiracy theories, and where scientific and medical experts are trashed and undermined if the inconveniently undermine the agenda of far right extremists and, of course, the dangerous buffoon who inhabits the White House.  In the midst of an unprecedented pandemic, this transformation of the GOP is not just disturbing, it is literally life threatening and shows the extremes of the self-centered nature of so-called conservatives who care nothing about those they endanger and may infect with Covid-19. How did this happen?  As I have often stated, in my view, it began with the infiltration of the GOP by evangelicals and other "conservative Christians" - who are anything but true followers of Christ - who deny evolution and claim the earth is less than 10,000 years old and reject any form of science and knowledge that threatens the myths upon which they have based their religion and very small scale world view.  Once these forces grabbed hold of the party base it was only a matter of time before open racists and every kind of crackpot was welcomed into the GOP base.  At the same time, sane, educated people fled the GOP which is why the suburbs have shifted so strongly against the GOP.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the insanity of the GOP and far right.  Here are excerpts:

In 2018, Bob Woodward recounted then-White House chief of staff John Kelly’s view of President Trump. “He’s gone off the rails,” Kelly said. “We’re in Crazytown.”

Two years later, it feels as if the entire country resides in the Greater Crazytown Metropolitan Area.

In Provo, Utah, this week, anti-mask demonstrators, some wearing Trump 2020 paraphernalia, stormed a county commission meeting, forcing its adjournment.

In Tulsa, anti-mask protesters, some in MAGA gear, taunted, threw water and waved money at a black minister reading the Bible through a bullhorn and calling for reparations.

In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) sued to stop Atlanta from enforcing mask-wearing to mitigate the spread of the pandemic.

In Florida, longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, after the president commuted his sentence, said of his and Trump’s opponents: “They’re satanic.”

And here in Washington, Trump surpassed 20,000 falsehoods uttered as president while his administration temporarily took coronavirus data offline, his daughter posed with a can of beans and his trade adviser published an error-laden attack on the government’s top infectious-disease scientist.

The Great American Crackup is underway.

A week ago, I argued that Trump’s conspiracy theories “are spreading faster than covid-19 among his supporters, inducing mass delusion.” So I asked scholars to put this moment into historical and psychological context.

For the first time in our history, a president and a major political party have weaponized paranoia, to destabilizing effect.

Conservatives are inherently no more conspiratorial than liberals; only low education (and, relatedly, income) predict such tendencies. The difference, Uscinski says, is “we have a president who has built a coalition by reaching out to conspiracy-minded people.”

Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan finds that “our political elites are amplifying the fringe more than we’ve seen” in modern times, while a president mounts a “grinding attack on factual evidence.” The result, he says, is “conspiracy theories and misinformation become yoked to partisanship in increasingly powerful ways.”

There has always been what the late historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in U.S. politics: witch hunts, Illuminati, Red Scares. William Jennings Bryan promoted conspiracy theories. Richard Nixon believed in them. But Trump is unique in promoting conspiracy thinking from the bully pulpit, and in building a system in which elites — Republican Party leaders — validate the paranoia.

Americans, by nature, are more distrustful of authority than citizens of other advanced democracies. “You always hear Americans say, ‘I know my rights,’ but you never hear an American say, ‘I know my responsibilities and obligations,’ ” Stanford University public-opinion specialist Morris Fiorina observes. The distrust is compounded by polarization of the political system: the collapse of local media (replaced by coastal national media); the growing tendency to live, work and worship among people of similar beliefs; . . . .

An April study by Uscinski and others found Trump’s supporters were the most likely to believe the covid-19 threat was exaggerated — particularly Trump backers who paid the most attention to politics. This, the researchers said, was “likely a consequence of President Trump and other Republican/conservative elites publicly lending credence to this idea.”

And so strong Trump partisans refuse to wear masks. “The science is very clear: People take cues from political leaders,” Nyhan says. Leaders typically rejected conspiracy theories, and the public followed. Now, Trump embraces them, and his followers concur — some out of partisan solidarity, others out of genuine belief.

“Human psychology has not changed,” Nyhan says. What’s changed is we’re discovering that “democratic systems don’t work well when political elites don’t deal in factual information.”

In other words, it’s not us. It’s him.

Be very afraid as Trump tries to now hide accurate information about the pandemic and his followers are increasingly dangerous loose canons. 

America's Other Pandemic: Right Wing Hate

Hannity on February 27, 2020.

Each day Americans who choose to tune into Donald Trump's coronavirus press conferences get to watch a series of lies, untruths and a times dangerous misinformation by the narcissist -in-chief.  Yet Trump is hardly the only one spreading lies and, even worse, hatred and the embrace of egnorance and bigotry.  Fox News, after weeks of lies and misinformation, has its anchors denying what was said on video and captured for the world to see. Beyond Fox News, in the ugly underbelly of the right wing media, conspiracy theories are promoted, health experts are attacked - Dr. Anthony Fauci has needed increased security - and efforts to excuse the right's "glorious leader" malfeasance are non-stop. It is all part of the larger unleashing of hate that has plagued America since Trump's election which has given a green light to white supremacists and coddled some of the most extreme and bigoted acolytes of the Christian Right.  America needs to win the war against Covid-19, but it also needs to win the war against hate, bigotry and the celebration that Trump has unleashed.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this reality:

We see the best of America in the health-care workers and first-responders risking (and sometimes losing) their lives to help others. But we also see the pathologies that have surfaced (or recurred in new mutations) during Trump’s presidency: the scapegoating of religious minorities, attacks on science and scientists, and promotion of globalist conspiracy theories (in this case, that the World Health Organization conspired with communist China to conceal the virus).

This country’s woeful response to the virus has an obvious cause: a president who refused to heed warnings and to prepare, instead offering false assurances while the nation snoozed. Even now, inexcusable delays limit tests, ventilators and respirators, and even now President Trump resists a nationwide stay-at-home order.

But it’s painful for some to put the responsibility where it belongs. Christian broadcaster Rick Wiles, therefore, took a different tack. He blamed the Jews. “God is spreading it in your synagogues! You’re under judgment because you oppose his son, the Lord Jesus Christ,” he proclaimed on his TruNews platform. This is the same Rick Wiles who in November called Trump’s impeachment a “Jew coup.” And this is the same Rick Wiles whose TruNews outlet was granted press credentials by the Trump administration to cover the World Economic Forum in January; Wiles stayed in a room booked by the administration.

Others follow Trump’s lead in blaming scientists for our woes. As The Post first reported, the government had to step up security for Anthony Fauci, the top infectious-disease expert at the National Institutes of Health and the most visible scientist responding to the crisis. Threats had been made against the 79-year-old doctor, who frequently contradicts Trump’s uninformed happy talk. Fauci has been attacked by pro-Trump outlets such as Gateway Pundit and American Thinker, which labeled Fauci a “Deep-State Hillary Clinton-loving Stooge.” The dark-web conspiracy theorists from QAnon and the like do worse to Fauci, a loyal public servant under every president since Ronald Reagan.

Still others try to distract from the Trump administration’s failures by blaming a globalist conspiracy. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) demanded an investigation into the WHO for “helping Communist China cover up a global pandemic.” Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, former Trump U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), and Tom Cotton (Ark.), Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and pro-Trump outlets such as the Federalist and Breitbart have proclaimed similar sentiments. The scientists issued a report warning that the virus is “spreading with astonishing speed” and called for governments to “immediately activate the highest level of national response,” including immediate and extensive testing and planning for closing schools and workplaces.

And yet, Trump slept. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” he said on Feb. 28. He blew it. Not the scientists, not the WHO, and not the Jews.

Medical Expert Who Corrects Trump Targeted By the Far Right

The sickness of the far right in America is truly frightening.  In a time when the nation faces an extreme health threat and people are literally dying, many on the far right are attacking medical experts who, in their sick and warped view, criticize or challenge their "glorious leader," Donald Trump.  The embrace of ignorance and partisanship is stunning yet is in keeping with the Republican Party's descent into a body where ignorance is celebrated, unqualified individuals are appointed to positions because of their extreme ideology, and loyalty to a man who is loyal to no one. The latest preferred target is Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.  Speaking the truth and medically correct information is unacceptable to the Far right and Trump cult members. A piece in the New York Times looks at the right wing lie machine.  Here are excerpts:

At a White House briefing on the coronavirus on March 20, President Trump called the State Department the “Deep State Department.” Behind him, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, dropped his head and rubbed his forehead.

Some thought Dr. Fauci was slighting the president, leading to a vitriolic online reaction. On Twitter and Facebook, a post that falsely claimed he was part of a secret cabal who opposed Mr. Trump was soon shared thousands of times, reaching roughly 1.5 million people.

A week later, Dr. Fauci — the administration’s most outspoken advocate of emergency measures to fight the coronavirus outbreak — has become the target of an online conspiracy theory that he is mobilizing to undermine the president.

That fanciful claim has spread across social media, fanned by a right-wing chorus of Mr. Trump’s supporters, even as Dr. Fauci has won a public following for his willingness to contradict the president and correct falsehoods and overly rosy pronouncements about containing the virus.

The anti-Fauci sentiment is being reinforced by posts from Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group; Bill Mitchell, host of the far-right online talk show “YourVoice America”; and other outspoken Trump supporters such as Shiva Ayyadurai, who has falsely claimed to be the inventor of email.

The torrent of falsehoods aimed at discrediting Dr. Fauci is another example of the hyperpartisan information flow that has driven a wedge into the way Americans think. For the past few years, far-right supporters of President Trump have regularly vilified those whom they see as opposing him. Even so, the campaign against Dr. Fauci stands out because he is one of the world’s leading infectious disease experts . . .

It is the latest twist in the ebb and flow of right-wing punditry that for weeks echoed Mr. Trump in minimizing the threat posed by the coronavirus and arguably undercut efforts to alert the public of its dangers. . . . [right wing “news” outlets] now accuse Democrats and journalists of trying to use the pandemic to damage Mr. Trump politically.

“There seems to be a concerted effort on the part of Trump supporters to spread misinformation about the virus aggressively,” said Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington who has studied misinformation.

The Trump administration has previously shown a distaste for relying on scientific expertise, such as when dealing with climate change. But misinformation campaigns during a pandemic carry a unique danger because they may sow distrust in public health officials when accurate information and advice are crucial, said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who teaches digital ethics.

“What this case will show is that conspiracy theories can kill,” she said.

Ms. Phillips, the Syracuse assistant professor, said the campaign was part of a long-term conspiracy theory propagated by Mr. Trump’s followers.

“Fauci has just been particularly prominent,” she said. “But any public health official who gets cast in a conspiratorial narrative is going to be subject to those same kinds of suspicions, the same kinds of doubt.”

On Thursday, he joined a 30-minute Instagram Live discussion about the coronavirus hosted by the National Basketball Association star Stephen Curry.

In the session, Dr. Fauci, with a miniature basketball hoop behind him, conveyed the same message that he had said for weeks about the outbreak. “This is serious business,” he said. “We are not overreacting.”

The Far-Right Media Is Weaponizing Coronavirus

I continue to be shocked by those I know who ought to know better that continue to post and share false stories put out by right wing fringe publications like Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Red State, Town Hall, and, of course, Fox News.  These individuals seemingly never fact check stories and merely promote them because they fall in line with their prejudices - often racial or religiously extreme - and happily spread falsehoods while making themselves look like fools and/or bigots.  Now, with coronavirus creating semi-hysteria and fears and uncertainty, the right wing media machine is jumping into high gear and promoting falsehoods and out right misogyny as laid out in a piece in New York Magazine.  For "friends" who continue to promote false stories, they need to know that others are watching and judging them and not in a good way.   Here are article excerpts:

The coronavirus pandemic has been marked by medical uncertainty, rapidly changing information, and partisan rancor, making it a prime target for the spread of disinformation: some of that disinformation is about unproven cures, for both the disease and the disintegrating economy; some is intended to delegitimize the politicians who may or may not be in a position to steer the nation through it (and some of it comes not via the internet but from [Trump] the president himself; see the man who died after heeding Trump’s assurances that chloroquine was a possible answer to coronavirus). Jiore Craig is a political consultant at a research firm, GQR Insights and Action, who has spent the past four years tracking the spread of disinformation online, much of it originating with, or being propagated by, the far-right political media — sites like Breitbart and Infowars. The Cut spoke to her about the patterns she’s seen and how they’re playing out in the midst of this pandemic. [W]e study conservative bad actors, those known for putting out disinformation, and what’s been interesting in the midst of COVID-19 is that even they needed to take a moment to get their bearings. Typically bad actors on the right — conservative online media which rampantly spreads disinformation — are very quick to align, and get their messaging straight, which usually comes down to reaching for handy attacks, targeting women, etc. But in this moment, it took a while for them to turn their cannons in the same direction. Obviously there’s Fox News, but I’m talking about more specialized online publications, like Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Red State, Town Hall, and people like Ben Shapiro and Tomi Lahren. There’s something called Salem Media Group; they control niche Facebook pages like I Am A Conservative Woman and Shut Down Planned Parenthood, and the social network only recently identified that both of those pages were controlled by Salem. I focus on what’s being shared on Facebook and other platforms where the majority of voters are spending their time. We know that Facebook increasingly has an older audience, so I look at what’s spreading there.
 [T]hose pages I mentioned often coordinate; they’re posting at the same time and coordinating around specific attacks, and one area where they do that is attacks on women. And there is a good example involving coronavirus. When Trump called out individual politicians, including governors like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, it was very easy for these sites to use a typical framing right away: an unflattering picture of her, where she looks drunk or cross-eyed, or appears dumb, crazy, emotional, unhinged, angry. The sites are ready to echo each other, and so they amplified an attack on Whitmer more than they amplified attacks on other male governors that Trump got into fights with last week. Now part of that is that Whitmer is in a swing state, while Andrew Cuomo, for example, is not. But it’s also that those misogynistic frames are so readily available to them.

They’re very organized, very militant: they will push out the same line as a steady drum beat— the same hashtags, #shiftySchiff or #nervousNancy, to signal that there’s a trend — whereas voices on the left are more individualistic.

So now with Coronavirus, they’ve landed on attacking the left about “PC culture” — arguing that the left is more worried about the racist phrasing Trump uses for the virus than about the virus itself. That’s an example of something they’ve unified on since last week, because they know this playbook; they know how to attack the left on PC culture; they can run with that.

[W]henever we see a social media spike that isn’t correlated with what’s happening in the news and wonder what’s driving that, it’s something that is driven by the right. I still think people underestimate how wide-reaching these pages are and how good they are at repetition. The second part is, how much of what is published online from the right is connected back to pretty extreme movements. I wasn’t expecting my work — which is typically to deal with candidates and how opinions about them are formed — to get so quickly into hate speech, man-o-spheres, intense online misogyny. . . . . the reality is that this is what the mainstream is now on the right. The conservative media I mentioned earlier, which some may consider fringe, have become more mainstream on social media in terms of the volume of content they generate and their reach. W]e’re going to see a lot of conspiracy theories being applied. But the bad actors don’t really know who to attack at the moment; it can’t quite be about government control, because Trump is the government. So there’s going to be a question of how to make it about the Democrats: maybe invoking false claims around martial law. You have Alex Jones and Infowars profiting off of readiness products because people are scared. We may get to the conspiracy that Democrats want to take away their guns and take away their rights. And I think both sides will start asking: Were you focused on people’s health or were you focused on politics-or-profits? Both sides will try to make it seem like the other side isn’t focused on the issue at hand.

Times of crisis show us who remains logical and acting on facts, not conspiracy theories and lies (and prejudices and bigotry), and  some who are blinding promoting far right disinformation should pause to consider how they will be viewed once the crisis has passed.

Inspector General: Russia Investigation Wasn’t an FBI Witch Hunt

Like Hitler and the Nazi regime, Donald Trump works to use two propaganda efforts to subvert the truth and to play to his knuckle dragging base.  One is to attack the independent media. that endeavors to report the truth regardless of whether or not it is popular with Trump and what Hillary Clinton aptly referred to as the "deplorables" in his base.  As a recent piece in the New York Times noted: Hitler and the Nazis had found the simple slogan they repeated again and again to discredit reporters: “Lügenpresse.” . . . .  which in English is “fake news.”  The other method is to promote conspiracy theories and outright lies.  One of the latter is Trump's refrain that the entire Russiagate investigation was a "witch hunt" and therefore should not be believed by his cult- like true believers. With the release of the Inspector General report, the Trump "witch hunt" mantra against the FBI suffered a major blow - much to the chagrin of Attorney General William Barr, perhaps, in my opinion, one of the most corrupt individuals to ever serve as Attorney General. A piece in New York Magazine looks at the inspector general report. Here are article excerpts:

Throughout both the Mueller and the subsequent House Intelligence Committee investigations of Trump campaign and administration dealings with foreign governments, [Trump's] the president’s allies have relentlessly promoted a counter-narrative full of lurid conspiracy theories. They all date back to an alleged “deep state” plot in 2016 to keep Trump from becoming president by using allegations allegedly planted by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to accuse his campaign of colluding with Russia.

A long-awaited Department of Justice report in response to these claims from Inspector General Michael Horowitz has largely exonerated the FBI of charges of political bias, while criticizing the reliance on the so-called Steele Dossier in the agency’s application for a wiretap on one key Trump operative, foreign-policy adviser Carter Page. Horowitz’s boss Attorney General William Barr is not happy about it, according to the Washington Examiner . . . . Barr made clear his displeasure with Monday’s report almost as soon as it came out.

While Horowitz suggested that the wiretap on Page was not properly secured, he views that sideshow as irrelevant to the bigger investigation and does not think it represents some sort of coordinated effort to invent a scandal designed to damage Trump’s campaign, as Politico explains in its takeaways from the IG report: . . . Horowitz found that the Crossfire Hurricane team — the codename agents gave to the Russia inquiry — did not receive Steele’s election reporting materials until after the investigation had already been opened using information about Papadopoulos the team received from a foreign ally.

Horowitz also found that the decision to pursue an investigation was above the pay grades of the “FBI Lovebirds” Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the key figures in the right-wing counter-narrative whose emails to each other displayed hostility to Trump.

Horowitz will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee later this week to discuss his findings, and you can be sure Republicans will make every effort to link his criticisms of the pre-Trump Justice Department and FBI to the “witch hunt” they are alleging during impeachment proceedings currently in the hands of the House Judiciary Committee. But it looks like slim pickings for those claiming that candidate or President Trump is an innocent victim of partisan shenanigans.

El Paso Killer Echoed the Words of Conservative "Media Stars"

At work in the kitchen I will walk in and find on occasion that someone has set the TV to Fox News.  I typically turn it off or change thee channel rather that hear the lies and distortions spewing from the like of Laura Ingraham or other "stars" of the conservative media universe. Some of the things said are so outlandish that one has to wonder who believes the crap being said - certainly not the anchors who cannot possibly believe some of the things that are so far from even remotely true. The shooter in El Paso apparently not only listened to the lies but believed them and acted on them.  That's the conclusion in a piece in the New York Times that looks at the shooters "manifesto" and other writings.  Words have consequences, yet the shrills of Fox News and other conservative "news" sites care nothing about the potential for violence they are happily creating.  Just yesterday, the Orlando Sentinel reported as follows:

Richard D. Clayton, 26, of Winter Park, [a white supremacist] was arrested Friday after he posted threats to kill or do bodily harm on Facebook.  According to officials, the investigation began Tuesday after Clayton made a threat on Facebook saying: "3 more days of probation left then I get my AR-15 back. Don't go to Walmart next week." 

People are listening and some will frighteningly act in violent ways. Here are highlights from the Times piece: 

Tucker Carlson went on his prime-time Fox News show in April last year and told his viewers not to be fooled. The thousands of Central Americans on their way to the United States were “border jumpers,” not refugees, he said. “Will anyone in power do anything to protect America this time,” he asked, “or will leaders sit passively back as the invasion continues?”

When another group approached the border six months later, Ann Coulter, appearing as a guest on Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show, offered a dispassionately violent suggestion about what could be done to stem the flow of migrants: “You can shoot invaders.”

A few days after, Rush Limbaugh issued a grim prognosis to his millions of radio listeners: If the immigrants from Central America weren’t stopped, the United States would lose its identity.

There is a striking degree of overlap between the words of right-wing media personalities and the language used by the Texas man who confessed to killing 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso this month. In a 2,300-word screed posted on the website 8chan, the killer wrote that he was “simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”

[H]is post contains numerous references to “invasion” and cultural “replacement” — ideas that, until recently, were relegated to the fringes of the nationalist right.

An extensive New York Times review of popular right-wing media platforms found hundreds of examples of language, ideas and ideologies that overlapped with the mass killer’s written statement — a shared vocabulary of intolerance that stokes fears centered on immigrants of color. The programs, on television and radio, reach an audience of millions.

“Calling it anything but an invasion at this point is just not being honest with people,” Laura Ingraham, host of “The Ingraham Angle,” said on her show on July 10. Days after the shooting, the “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade dismissed a connection between words used by the gunman and by President Trump, saying: “If you use the term ‘invasion,’ that’s not anti-Hispanic. It’s a fact.”

In the four years since Mr. Trump electrified Republican voters with slashing comments about Muslims and Mexicans, demonizing references to immigrants have become more widespread in the news media, the Times review found.

Sometimes the hosts are repeating [Trump's] the president’s signature phrases. Sometimes [Trump] the president appears to take his cues from television pundits. The cumulative effect is a public dialogue in which denigrating sentiments about immigrants are common.

Before the first groups of Central American migrants received heavy news media coverage in 2018, words like “invaders” or “invasion” were rarely used by American outlets. In the last year, the use of such terms has surged, with references to an immigrant “invasion” appearing on more than 300 Fox News broadcasts. The vast majority of those were spoken by Fox News hosts and guests, but some included clips of Mr. Trump using that language at rallies and other public appearances.

“It’s a bit of a vicious cycle,” said the conservative writer William Kristol, a Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s who has worked at Fox News and other networks. “Something is said on Fox News, and Trump repeats it, and that legitimizes it — and then someone else goes a little further.”

He added, “The use of what once would have been viewed as really extreme and inappropriate and sometimes conspiratorial, sometimes dehumanizing language is really striking.”

The Trump-friendly media world — from outlets like Sinclair Broadcast Group and The Drudge Report to platforms like Breitbart News and Gateway Pundit — has used similar incendiary rhetoric. At the start of the El Paso suspect’s screed, he refers to the “great replacement,” a white supremacist conspiracy theory based on a French book that claims the migration of minority groups can lead to a “genocide” of white culture.

The El Paso suspect, who confessed to the mass shooting last week, claimed in the document he posted to be defending against a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The words “invasion” and “invaders” appear six times in the text, a stark parallel to the language heard on conservative television and talk radio today.

Before the El Paso shootings, others with deadly or hateful motives used the same language. 

The man who is alleged to have killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue last October had expressed his contempt for “invaders” before he opened fire on the congregation with an AR-15-style assault rifle, the authorities say. During the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 that left one woman dead, marchers shouted, “You will not replace us.”

Lawrence Rosenthal, a professor at the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said that the shared vocabulary of white nationalists and many prominent conservatives was chilling. “Where that intersects with the Republican Party today,” he added, “is the Republican argument that the Democrats are in favor of immigration because that will give them a permanent majority.”

The overlap between fringe ideology and the words of conservative talk show hosts is not accidental, critics say. “They’re putting that into the zeitgeist,” said Carl Cameron, the former chief political correspondent for Fox News, who is now working for a news aggregator aimed at a progressive audience, Front Page Live.

“Fox goes out and looks for stuff that is inherently on fire and foments fear and anger,” Mr. Cameron added.

Days after the El Paso massacre, Mr. Carlson said on-air that white supremacy was “actually not a real problem in America” and likened it to a “hoax.”

Be very afraid of the seeds these irresponsible shrills and self-promoters are sowing.  

Corey Stewart Aide Compared GOP Establishment to "House Negro," Disparaged Civil Rights Leaders

Lest we forget that not all insane Republicans are found in Washington, D.C., Corey Stewart's campaign is underscoring the extremism of both Stewart's agenda and how the Republican Party of old is dead and gone.  Specifically, Rick Shaftan, a spokesman and leading consultant for Stewart called "establishment Republicans" by the derogatory term of "house Negros" and then went on to attack leaders in the civil rights movement.  Like Stewart who is challenging Democrat Tim Kaine for one of Virginia's U.S. Senate seats, Shaftan makes little effort to hide his racial bigotry or his willingness to subscribe to far right conspiracy theories.  Here are highlights from CNN:

A top consultant and spokesman for Corey Stewart, the Republican nominee for US Senate in Virginia, has used the term "house negro" to criticize the GOP establishment and disparaged prominent Civil Rights figures John Lewis and Rosa Parks.

Rick Shaftan made the comments in tweets newly uncovered by CNN's KFile. The previously unreported tweets come on the heels of a report from the Daily Beast that he described majority-black cities as "sh**holes" and told his followers not to open businesses in black neighborhoods.

Shaftan's consulting firm, Atlantic Media & Research, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Stewart's campaigns for governor and Senate, according to election records. He previously worked on Stewart's gubernatorial campaign and for a super PAC that backed Paul Nehlen, a candidate for Paul Ryan's congressional seat who has made racist and anti-Semitic posts on social media. 

Stewart, who has faced scrutiny of his own for defending Confederate symbols and publicly associating with white nationalists in the past, is challenging Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine in November.

Neither Shaftan nor the Stewart campaign returned a CNN request for comment. In response to the Daily Beast story, Shaftan wrote on Facebook, "I must have said something worse than that in all these years! They need to look harder."

A closer look reveals that in a tweet on October 2014, Shaftan wrote, "There are a lot of parallels between the 'House Negro' and the GOP Establishment."

In September 2015, Shaftan again used the derogatory term, which refers to slaves who worked in the house of their master as opposed to in the fields, implying that the slaves' loyalty lay with the master rather than with their fellow slaves.

In September 2015, he suggested that he did not admire civil rights figure Rosa Parks, tweeting, "Rosa Parks. Give me a effing break. How about PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY?" Schlafly was a conservative political activist.

Shaftan wrote of Democratic Georgia Rep. John Lewis in January 2017, "So what has John Lewis done besides get beat up 50+ years ago? #PompousAss." In 1965, a then- 25-year-old Lewis was beaten badly by state troopers while marching for voting rights in Alabama.

In other posts, Shaftan referred to Michael Brown, the black teenager shot by white police officer Darren Wilson, as a "thug", saying that he "received justice at the hands of Officer Wilson" in August 2014. In response to the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, following Brown's shooting, Shaftan tweeted, "Animals. #Ferguson" in November 2014.

In July of this year, Shaftan referred to New Jersey's attorney general, the first Sikh to hold the office, as "Turban Man," a term for which two local radio hosts were suspended last week.

In April 2017, Shaftan also hinted at the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, joking on Facebook, "You all know we never saw the REAL Obama Birth Certificate because it had Politically Incorrect 1961 language on it."Responding to a comment saying that he thought the birth certificate might have said "illegitimate," Shaftan wrote, "Or 'bastard', or 'colored', or 'Negro', etc."

Sadly, Stewart and Shaftan now represent the face of much of the Republican Party base. It is crucial that anyone who finds this version of the GOP offensive get out and vote for Tim Kaine in November.  Stewart needs to lose by the widest margin possible.