Before the last smoking shell from conservative terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s gun fell to the ground, the Rightwing Noise Machine was already dismissing his connections to Christian Dominionism and the Tea Party culture wars. He was a madman, pure and simple.
This was exactly the strategy used by the conservative media with Jared Loughner, the assassin who shot Democratic Congresswomen Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others attending a political event. The investigation showedLoughner was steeped in the rightwing “sovereign citizen,” tax-protester, back-to-the-gold-standard movement, which uses “arguments” eerily similar to Tea Party campaign literature. No matter, announced the Rightwing Noise Machine unconvincingly: he was just nuts.
But the fact that Breivik left a trail of fairly coherent public comments, including an endlessly detailed manifesto, replete with a fixation with “cultural marxism,” a conspiracy theory used by every Tea Party talking head in the US over the past two years, has made the conservative insanity defense even more unpersuasive this time. America is still waiting breathlessly for Sarah Palin to cry “blood libel” on any suggestion to the contrary.
Indeed, Breivik’s manifesto seems to borrow directly from the 1999 manifesto of Paul Weyrich, the “New Right” conservative darling and go-getting would-be theocrat who co-founded the Heritage Foundation, and the Free Congress Foundation, two conservative think tanks that grind out deceptive graphics and statistics as the meat and potatos [Quayle sic] of Republican politicians. The infamous paranoid quote in Weyrich’s ideological phantasmagoria has been source of conspiracy theories, Islamophobia and knownothingism for every second-rate conservative talk show host ever since:
"Those who came up with Political Correctness, which we more accurately call "Cultural Marxism," did so in a deliberate fashion...it is impossible to ignore the fact that the United States is becoming an ideological state [under the] ideology of Political Correctness, which openly calls for the destruction of our traditional culture."
Replace “United States” with “Norway” and we have Breivik’s intellectual road map to mass political murder.
One of the most prominent Tea Party bullhorns of the cultural marxism crank trope is Joseph Ferah, creationist, birther extraordinaire, and founder of the incomprehisible WorldNetDaily. Just listen:
“I predict the Obama Administration will give illegal aliens . . . citizenship. With citizenship comes the right to vote and thereby securing election after election for the Cultural Marxists. . . The goals of Cultural Marxism are primarily the destruction of Christianity and the creation of chaos. The ultimate goal is to move from Cultural Marxism to traditional Marxism and that is what is happening to America today
Sound familiar. Look at Breivik’s manifesto and replace illegal aliens as the focus of Ferah’s xenophobia with Muslims, and we have liftoff. Ferah is a consultant for Donald Trump and frequently speaks at conservative hate fests along with Michele Bachmann. He was an early booster of the Tea Party and its manias. Here they are together, two peas in a alien pod.
Take a stroll down the dark tarry tunnel of Free Republic, or endure the pages of the Weekly Standard, or google Andrew Breitbart’s rants (hell, even their last names look similar), or visit a Tea Party website (like this one) and you find the very same obsessions that haunted Breivik: fear of being emasculated by feminism, fear of Muslims, fear of nonwhites, fear of multiculturalism, fear of complex economies, fear of science, fear of educated people. Fear.
"What Is Cultural Marxism?" rhetorically asked William Lind, one of Weyrich's faux scholars at the Free Congress Foundation. And the answer: something he fears.
The Rightwing Noise Machine is belching huge volumes of smoke trying to deal with the obvious connections between Breivik and Tea Party ideology. But it’s all rather hapless. Bill O’Reilly’s recent feckless “no true Scotsman" proclamation only emphasizes just how poisonous conservative discourse has become. If you have to take pains to distinguish yourself from a man who blew up Norway’s parliament, got a gun and killed dozens of “liberal” teenagers, because otherwise the public might get confused, then maybe you’re espousing the wrong things.
The funniest aspect of this – if anything so politically obscene can be called amusing – is Breitbart’s reaction. Faced with numerous examples of him mouthing the Weyrich (Breivik) meme of cultural marxism, the Fox personality [sic] appears to be systematically removing the references from his website (either that or Fox cut his budget to pay for Rupert Murdoch’s legal fees). Fortunately, Crooks and Liars already caught him red-handed. You can take the ugly, paranoid, violent rhetoric out of the ugly paranoid, but you can’t take the ugly, paranoid, violent rhetoric out of the backup servers.
Is Breivik insane? Of course he is. Only a lunatic kills dozens of innocent people. And that what’s so chilling: his crazy violent views are not very different from Breitbart’s, or Ferah’s, or O’Reilly’s, or Bachmann’s. And we must never let them forget that.