Tag: Council on Foreign Relations

The Rise Of America’s Lunatic Fringe

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in 9/11, 9/11 conspiracy theories, Birther Crazies, Birther Cult, Birther Kook, Birther Kooks, Birtherism, Conspiracism, Conspiracy, Conspiracy Crackpots, Conspiracy Crazies, Conspiracy Cult, Conspiracy Delusions, Conspiracy Loons, Conspiracy Lunatics, Conspiracy Nut, Conspiracy Nuts, Conspiracy Sociopaths, Conspiracy Theories, Conspiracy Theorists, Conspiracy Thinking

Submitted by Tyler Durden

Authored by chindit

The Rise Of America’s Lunatic Fringe

Anyone who spends any amount of time on the internet has seen them.

They are the moonbats, the wingnuts, the whackjobs, the Conspiratorialists.  They are America’s new Lunatic Fringe, and their numbers are growing.

While the rise of the internet fed a segment of society that has always existed, when the cyberworld became an increasingly important source both of entertainment and information, an entirely new demographic joined what was already amongst us.

Who are they and what do they believe?  The Lunatic Fringe is not uniform in either its background or beliefs.  Some clearly seem to be emotionally disturbed.  Some are racist and hateful.  Others are simply naïve and gullible, or uninformed.  Still more are frustrated by an economy and a government that are behaving out of whack with what most people expected from life and from leadership.  They want to believe America stands for something noble, but it is increasingly felt by them that it does not.  They are confused, frustrated, and disappointed.  They feel violated and betrayed.  They grow angrier by the day.  Some harbor a diffuse rage which could blow at any time. Others have figuratively thrown in the towel and have joined the ranks of what are called Preppers and Survivalists.

Collectively, though individually they differ, the beliefs of the Fringe conspiracies behind the JFK assassination, the lunar landing, and 911.  The collective also includes the Birthers, and believers in everything from FEMA Camps to chemtrails to that retro old favorite of Colonel Jack Ripper, fluoridation.  The Fringe holds beliefs that have the world controlled variously by the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Bilderbergers, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones, the Council on Foreign Relations, 33rd Degree Freemasons, the Vatican, the Queen of England, or just The Illuminati.  Every event and every incident in the world is affected by some Master Plan carried out by whomever the believer chooses from the aforementioned gallery of rogues.  For many, al Qaeda is really al CIAda, and the prime directive of that organization, along with all the other USG alphabet agencies, is to further the goals of the elite, usually through some “false flag” operation or “psy-op”, and funded through illicit drug sales.

Believers can “prove” each and every one of their claims via a series of cross-referenced and circular internet links, the source of many undoubtedly just someone’s fertile imagination, but very real to the believers.

To the uninitiated this all seems rather humorous, albeit slightly unsettling.  It would be both wrong and unwise, however, just to slough it off as the ramblings of the insane.  The reason such beliefs are gaining favor is because many Americans have lost faith and lost trust in the government and America’s elected leadership.  Given what has happened over the last decade, this is not only understandable, it is even, in an odd way, reasonable.  A continual drift to the fringe can be expected because of the many very real things that make the foolish things suddenly more believable.

Why have the people lost faith and trust?  There is a host of reasons, perhaps beginning with the war of choice in Iraq and the vociferous and passionate claims of WMD that turned out to be false.  That war cost lives, cost sympathy and diplomatic capital, and cost trillions even when America was told by former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz that the war “would pay for itself from oil sales” and that “Americans would be welcomed with garlands”.  Neither was anything close to accurate.  Instead the US has war dead, war wounded, a huge bill, fewer friends, and many more enemies.

What truly exacerbated the rush to the fringe were the Financial Crisis and the subsequent railroaded bailouts, which “democratic” America opposed to the tune of 97%, and which were, and still are viewed as rewarding the very people who caused the collapse.  The oft-spoken official claims that “the taxpayer made a profit on the bailouts” just adds salt to the taxpayers’ wounds, as it conveniently fails to take into account the host of programs—from TALF to ZIRP to QEI, II, and III and Twist—that virtually handed the banks the money with which they could “pay back” the bailout cash.

America sees backroom deals and favors to insiders every step of the way, and rightfully so they see this, because that is exactly how the bailout was affected.  No one had to pay for his mistakes, and equally significant, no one has been prosecuted despite overwhelming evidence of fraud, malfeasance, and corruption.  Americans cannot help but subscribe to the cynical quip, “everyone is equal under the law, except for those who are above it”.  Fines don’t count, especially when the money to pay them comes right back through another door.

America’s prisons are filled with people who did little more than use a banned substance.  It’s time some bankers and officials faced the possibility of similar accommodations, as their crimes are greater and victims substantially more.

The belief that all is not fair is further cemented when the Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer can be taped (PBS, “Frontline”) saying, “Well, I think I am pursuing justice. And I think the entire responsibility of the department is to pursue justice. But in any given case, I think I and prosecutors around the country, being responsible, should speak to regulators, should speak to experts, because if I bring a case against institution A, and as a result of bringing that case, there’s some huge economic effect — if it creates a ripple effect so that suddenly, counterparties and other financial institutions or other companies that had nothing to do with this are affected badly — it’s a factor we need to know and understand.”

No matter how one parses that quote it still says the same thing: some are above the law.

The American people are well aware they have been lied to by the leadership.  They know that a lobbyist has an infinitely greater chance of getting his way than an entire nation of voters.  They know who pays the bills—the taxpayer—as well as who pays the politicians—the lobbyists.  They see the Federal Debt ballooning to Greek-like proportions, and the best Congress can do, other than take vacation or kick the can, is to tell Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to “get to work, Mr. Chairman”, which means print more money, monetize the deficit, and further dilute the value of the dollar.

Even some people within the government are undoubtedly growing frustrated.  Imagine someone in DEA, FBI, CIA, or the military, who sees the slap on the wrist fine handed to a certain non-US bank for a decade or more of drug money laundering and laundering money for Iran, some of which might well have found its way to Hezbollah or to parties aiding the Iraqi insurgency.  There are people in Waziristan who face the wrath of a drone-fired Hellfire missile with less evidence to back up the attack.  This bank, incidentally, received a $3.5 billion payment-in-full upon the US taxpayer bailout of insurer AIG.

When trust is gone, everything becomes an affront, a conspiracy, a power grab by the elite.  The recently passed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which gives the President incredibly broad powers, seems to obviate both habeas corpus and the entire Bill of Rights.  When the trust is gone, people are less willing to believe that such a bill would never be used recklessly, or vindictively to put down vocal opponents of whatever Administration happens to be in power at the time.  When trust is gone, the people question new efforts to alter the Second Amendment, even if many are personally outraged at the rash of gun violence that has come to epitomize the United States, so they rush to guns rather than run from them.  When the trust is gone, the message of the Lunatic Fringe is afforded greater reception.  When the trust is gone the Fringe grows into the mainstream.  When trust is gone in some aspects of governance, all governance is questioned.

The government can no longer afford to ignore the Lunatic Fringe, because it is becoming less loon and more understandably and righteously indignant every day.  The government did not create the Fringe, but through callous disregard, incompetence, blatant self-interest, cronyism, selective enforcement, and pandering to its financial support base, the government has fertilized the fringe until it has grown to redwood-like size.  The nation’s leadership is viewed not with respect, but with distrust.  It is not the solution, but the problem.  It has morphed from friend to enemy, at least for a not insignificant portion of the citizenry.   The fringe is not going to go away, but instead it will grow.  Its wounds will fester.  It will continue to hammer away at an already fragile society.  It may well lead to significant social unrest, even violence, and that violence is likely to be directed at those seen as responsible for the fiscal, financial and moral decay, which means the elite and the government that is seen as catering to it.  New records in the Dow will not alter the focus, nor ameliorate the bubbling rage, even if the financial media or the Federal Reserve thinks it will.  This growing demographic of citizens must have its concerns addressed before it is too late.

Woe to those who ignore it, because they will become the targets, rightfully or not.

To paraphrase a certain career New York Senator, “Mr. Government, get to work!”  Or better yet, get out of the way.

The Crazy, Paranoid World of Ron Paul

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in John Birch Society Crazies, John Birch Society Cult, Ron Paul Conspiracy Nut

Ron Paul’s World

By JAMES KIRCHICK

Earlier this week, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, said that he would not vote for his fellow presidential candidate Ron Paul should Paul become the Republican nominee. The immediate cause of this dissension – highly unusual in a party primary – was the repugnant newsletters that Paul published from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, which contain a raft of bigoted statements. Paul has denied authorship and implausibly claims not to know who wrote them.

The story of the newsletters is not new. In 1996, Lefty Morris, Paul’s Democratic Congressional opponent, publicized a handful, and in January 2008, I published a long piece in The New Republic based on my discovery of batches of the newsletters held at the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Yet Paul’s popularity in the prelude to the Iowa caucuses, where many polls put him in first place, has renewed attention to their revolting contents.

Recent media reports have tended to focus on the newsletters’ bigotry, which was primarily aimed at blacks, and to a smaller extent at gay people and Jews. The newsletters have complicated the situation for writers who have defended Paul, who point out that there is no trace of such prejudice in his public statements. Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Beast, for instance, writing last week about “rethinking” his original endorsement of Paul, suggests that

A fringe protest candidate need not fully address issues two decades ago that do not in any way reflect the campaign he has run or the issues on which he has made an appeal. But a man who could win the Iowa caucuses and is now third in national polls has to have a plausible answer for this.

In a long, anguished post on the Web site of The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf wrote that “the question is complicated by facts not in evidence and inherently subjective judgments about politics, race and the norms that govern how much a candidate’s bygone associations matter.” As long as one accepts the most charitable explanation for Paul’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act (it infringes on private property rights) or re-litigation of the Civil War (the government should have bought and released the slaves instead), perhaps there’s something to that argument. Though Paul’s penchant for promoting the cause of secession puts these stances in a dubious context.

But there is one major aspect of the newsletters, no less disturbing than their racist content, that has always been present in Paul’s rhetoric, in every forum: a penchant for conspiracy theories.

Ron Paul at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on Feb. 11, 2011.
Jonathan Ernst/ReutersRon Paul at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on Feb. 11, 2011.

In a 1990 C-Span appearance, taped between Congressional stints, Paul was asked by a caller to comment on the “treasonous, Marxist, alcoholic dictators that pull the strings in our country.” Rather than roll his eyes, Paul responded,“there’s pretty good evidence that those who are involved in the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations usually end up in positions of power. And I believe this is true.”

Paul then went on to stress the negligible differences between various “Rockefeller Trilateralists.” The notion that these three specific groups — the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family — run the world has been at the center of far-right conspiracy theorizing for a long time, promoted especially by the extremist John Birch Society, whose 50th anniversary gala dinner Paul keynoted in 2008.

Paul is proud of his association with the society, telling the Times Magazine in 2007, “I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution.” In 1998, Paul appeared in a Birch Society documentary which lauded a bill he had introduced to force American withdrawal from the United Nations. With ominous music in the background and images of United Nations peacekeepers patrolling deserted streets, the film warned that the world body would destroy American private property rights, replace the Constitution with the United Nations Charter and burn churches to the ground.

Paul has frequently attacked the alleged New World Order that “elitist” cabals, like the Trilateral Commission and the Rockefeller family, in conjunction with “globalist” organizations, like the United Nations and the World Bank, wish to foist on Americans. In a 2006 column published on the Web site of Lew Rockwell (his former Congressional chief of staff and the man widely suspected of being the ghostwriter of the newsletters, although he denied it to me), Paul addressed the alleged “Nafta Superhighway.” This is a system of pre-existing and proposed roads from Mexico to Canada that conspiracy theorists claim is part of a nefarious transnational attempt to open America’s borders and merge the United States with its neighbors into a supra-national entity. Paul wrote that the ultimate goal of the project was an “integrated North American Union” — yet one more bugbear of conspiracy theorists — which “would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty altogether.”

In his newsletters, Paul expressed support for far-right militia movements, which at the time saw validation for their extreme, anti-government beliefs in events like the F.B.I. assault on the Branch Davidians and at Ruby Ridge. Paul was eager to fan their paranoia and portray himself as the one man capable of doing anything about it politically. Three months before the Oklahoma City bombing, in an item for the Ron Paul Survival Report titled, “10 Militia Commandments,” he offered advice to militia members, including that they, “Keep the group size down,” “Keep quiet and you’re harder to find,” “Leave no clues,” “Avoid the phone as much as possible,” and “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

The closest Paul has come in his public statements to endorsing violence against the government was during an interview in 2007, when he was asked about Ed and Elaine Brown, a New Hampshire couple who had refused to pay federal income taxes. In the summer of that year, they instigated a five-month armed standoff with United States marshals, whom Ed Brown accused of being part of a “Zionist, Illuminati, Freemason movement.” Echoing a speech he had just delivered on the House floor, Paul praised the pair as “heroic” “true patriots,” likened them to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and compared them favorably to “zombies,” that is, those of us who “just go along” and pay income tax.

Finally, there’s Paul’s stance on the most pervasive conspiracy theory in America today, the idea that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were perpetrated not by Al Qaeda, but by the federal government or some other shadowy force. While Paul has never explicitly endorsed this claim, there is a reason so many 9/11 “truthers” flock to his campaign. In a recent YouTube video posted by a leading 9/11 conspiracy group, “We Are Change,” Paul is asked, “Why won’t you come out about the truth about 9/11?”

Rather than answer, say, that the “9/11 Commission already investigated the attacks,” or ask the questioner what particular element of “the truth” remained unknown, Paul knowingly replied, “Because I can’t handle the controversy, I have the I.M.F., the Federal Reserve to deal with, the I.R.S. to deal with, no because I just have more, too many things on my plate. Because I just have too much to do.”

Paul knows where his bread is buttered. He regularly appears on the radio program of Alex Jones, a vocal 9/11 and New World Order conspiracy theorist based in his home state of Texas. On Jones’s show earlier this month, Paul alleged that the Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador on United States soil was a “propaganda stunt” perpetrated by the Obama administration.

In light of the newsletters and his current rhetoric, it is no wonder that Paul has attracted not just prominent racists, but seemingly every conspiracy theorist in America. The title of one of Paul’s newsletter series – the Ron Paul Survival Report – was a conscious appeal to followers of the “survivalist” movement of the 1990s, whose ideology blended white supremacy and anti-government militancy in preparation for what Paul himself termed the “coming race war.”

As Paul told The Times last week, he has no interest in dissuading the various extremists from backing his campaign, which is hardly surprising considering he’s spent three decades cultivating their support. Paul’s shady associations are hardly “bygone” and the “facts” of his dangerous conspiracy-mongering are very much “in evidence.” Paul has not just marinated in a stew of far-right paranoia; he is one of the chefs.

Of course, it is impossible to know what Ron Paul truly thinks about black or gay people or the other groups so viciously disparaged in his newsletters. What we do know with absolute certainty, however, is that Ron Paul is a paranoid conspiracy theorist who regularly imputes the worst possible motives to the very government he wants to lead.

James Kirchick is a contributing editor for The New Republic and a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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