You ever wonder where all this wackiness comes from on the right? How these appeals are couched (creeping socialism, Soros conspiracies, ACORN stormtroopers)?
It's the same-old same-old: Republicans whistling and twiddling their thumbs as their drum majors bring out the Neo-Nazi white-supremacist standard and march it around the public square, using their God-given right to free speech to appeal to their radical constituency with blatant antisemitism and blatant anti-black racism.
ACORN is a voter-registration and working-class advocacy group that's been around for almost a half-century. George Soros is a Holocaust refugee turned investor. The current Malkin-endorsed theory is this: George Soros is funding ACORN to deviously steal elections and undermine right-wing opposition to financial regulation and tax reform.
Now, none of this has any link to reality. So how has this theory found such ground, so quickly, among dittoheads and other far-right Neo-Nazi-fellow-travelers? Simple: it's a quick and dirty rehashing of white supremacist ideas that stretch back to the beginning of the last century.
George Soros: Holocaust survivor turned successful investor, and thus a particularly personal renaming of the now-forbidden bogeyman of the American far right - the Jewish capitalist. This perfidious bloodsucker is the vampire of Glenn Beck/white supremacist legend. He pulls the levers of power, instituting a government that appears to be democratically elected, but obviously cannot be, because the "real Americans" of Sarah Palin's rhetoric had no part in this supposed impostor. Thus, the devious powers-that-be must be promoting their constant agenda against producerism and the powers of the "productive" capitalist and the "true American" worker: socialism combined with a manipulation of elite political and economic structures to threaten the traditional way of life of our country. Sound familiar? Wonder anymore why this idea is espoused by proponents of eliminationism like Michelle Malkin and old-school Knights-of-Columbus bigots like Bill O'Reilly?
ACORN: The thugs with which this new conspiracy threatens "real America": a perfidious recharacterization of the black servant of Jewish conquest. Wonder why this group is tied to Barack Obama? A quick search of Stormfront or of more classical white supremacist tracts will give you the answer: ACORN, as a poverty-concerned, voter-enfranchisement movement, is now used by the right as the stand-in of the supposed use of blacks by Jews as conquerors of white culture. This is why ACORN, a group that generally works by petition and public appeal, is suddenly being characterized as a group of thugs and shock troops in a conspiracy to destroy the conservative movement. This repackaging and relabeling allows the old myth to continue unabated, and even gives leave for it to be repeated by mainstream sources in the same trial-balloon style exposed by David Brock in Blinded by the Right - truly the keystone of American politics in the Clinton era.
These terms: "Soros" and "ACORN", "Jew" and "black" have been repackaged and reserved so carelessly as to practically demand exposure. The reason for this is clear: the right is seeking to consolidate its radical base by making hay while the sun shines on the most infuriating development to America's radical right in the history of the country: the election of a black president with an overwhelming popular mandate. The far right and the Republican media morass are facing the same death knell, and that the latter would appeal to the former is no surprise.
The question is whether we will have the guts to call it as we see it.