The religious fanatic arm of the Republican party is taking its victories incrementally and in inches. It was a great achievement for the evangelical wingnuts to get Roy Moore the primary win in Alabama over GOP preferred candidate Luther Strange. Then this weekend they got Trump to speak at the John Birch Society Value Voters Summit and boy are they crowing about that one. The high fives won’t stop for days. And the John Birch Society did indeed have a booth at the Value Voters Summit. They’re very much there, in the wings for the moment, but definitely staging a comeback:
As the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote in 2013, “Once considered by the right and the left as the political equivalent of an addled uncle sent down to the basement rec room to drink, rant and hopefully pass out before saying anything too nutty in front of the guests, in recent years the John Birch Society has been invited back upstairs and has even hosted a dinner party or two.”
JBS is probably best known for its decades-long obsession with fighting the communist infiltration of America, at one point even accusing President Dwight Eisenhower of being a communist agent. The group is still fighting what it sees as stealth communist infiltration, but in a different form; JBS CEO Arthur Thompson told SPLC in 2013, “While we’re sitting here proclaiming communism is dead, it’s growing everywhere and rapidly. It’s flourishing under different names, like the Muslim Brotherhood.”
In 2009, Rachel Maddow went into depth on the group’s record, including its opposition to public water fluoridation. More recently, JBS’s magazine, The New American, published an article that blamed the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting on “the assault on white men” in America that includes offenses from “‘affirmative action’ to massive Third World immigration.”
Fluoridation is bad, yep, and we daresay that the Society’s view on precious bodily fluids also comports with General Ripper’s, how could it not?
So this was the group that Donald Trump was proudly speaking to this weekend, these are “his people” and other faithful Trump followers did a post Summit show on none other than Fox News not only touting the Summit and Trump’s presence there, but far more importantly, taking dead aim at the right wingnuts’ newest avowed enemy, the elected officials of the Republican party. Pastor Robert Jeffress declared war on the Republican party, asking all the conservatives to pick up the phone and call Mitch McConnell. And he was mad as h,e, double l. [sic]
“He has nominated dozens of justices to the court….Those nominations are being blocked by the Republican controlled Senate. namely Mitch McConnell and his adherence to these arcane rules….Call up Mitch McConnell, Bob Corker and the rest of this do nothing, worth nothing and tell them ‘we’re as mad as h, e, double l and we’re not going to put up with this any more.’ [pounds fist on table] Quit obstructing this president’s agenda, which means they’re obstructing our agenda.”
Sean Hannity then went on a riff about how great health care coverage is going to be, with all the workers uniting to buy health care (after they get kicked off health care and have no more money to buy health care than they had before) and saying about Trump, “He had to do it on his own. I have no confidence in McCain, Murkowski, Collins whatsoever.”
Jerry Falwell intoned, “I don’t either. I spoke to the president last week and I told him he needs to coin a new term, ‘fake Republicans’ because that’s what those people you named are. They’re not really Republicans. We don’t really have a majority in the Senate and I think that would be a good term for him to start using. The fact that he spoke at the Value Voters Summit, today, first sitting president ever and he did his first graduation speech at Liberty University … I think it’s a sign that he understands that we’re under a full assault from the left of all traditional American values from the support of the State of Israel to even the NFL.”
If there are fakes to be called out anywhere, it’s these two fake religious leaders and their brethren. The right wing religionists are deranged. All they lack are tin foil hats. They are busy bringing together the worst elements of American culture, the Nazis, KKK, and groups such as the John Birch Society and together they all feed off of conspiracy theory and toxic ideology. Deplorable doesn’t even scratch the surface. That’s actually a diplomatic way of putting it.
The battle lines are clearly drawn at this point. Steve Bannon has made no bones about the fact that he wants to take down McConnell and Ryan and load the Senate with Roy Moore, Erik Prince and other right wingers.
A house divided upon itself cannot stand. Maybe the wingnuts should turn to scripture and ponder the phrase, “He who botherith in his own house shall inherit the wind.” It should be epic to see how Mitch McConnell deals with this bother.