In a string: Holocaust Denial, Moon shot denial, Truthers, then birthers. Now Sandy Hook Denial is settling in.
The massacre was faked. The 20 children were not killed. It was all staged to make an excuse for gun control.
And pigs fly....
Thing is, we've been watching these same pigs for 70 years. Joseph McCarthy had his "lists of names" of communists in the State Department. No names. No lists. Then it was the U.S. Army in 1954.
A paranoid scheme for every issue.
The John Birch Society was formed in 1959. The Birchers institutionalized McCarthyism. Calling the Baptist preachers in the Civil Rights Movement "communist agents" led to many Far Right alliances.
After Nixon's "Southern Strategy" and then his resignation in 1974, Paul Weyrich's Heritage Foundation and then Ronald Reagan's broad success cleaned up the worst of it.
But then we got to Lee Atwater and his "Willie Horton" ad in 1988. That was an astonishing hit with America's White paranoids. Republicans thought Lee was a genius.
NRA works the same crazy. Bircher Madness. They tell people that Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives ("ATF") has a hidden army set up to invade millions of homes, invoke a mysterious United Nations "Agenda 21," and seize their guns.
The propaganda mill has taken to savaging the survivors from Sandy Hook Elementary School. Autopsies are faked. They're all liars. The cops are liars.
There's more below le chignon d'orange. Expect interesting comments as a matter of course.
Between Bircher Madness and the ordinary goof balls, there is no limit to the crazy.
Sandy Hook Denial looks like Holocaust Denial on a smaller scale. The meanness astonishes.
Let's have looks at a few of these CT fads:
-- In the 1970s the poor goof-ball Rastafarians came up with a scheme where Whites ("Babylon") set up the world to oppress Blacks. (We knew they were goof-balls, right off, because they think Babylon's only aimed at Blacks.)
-- In 1990, Nurse Nayirah al-Sabah, then 15, disclosed in congressional testimony that Saddam Hussein's army had thrown Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators in hospital. Then someone remembered her. Nayirah was the daughter of Saud bin Nasir Al-Sabah, Kuwait's ambassador to the United States. She had been trained to lie with CIA-provided acting lessons. Cutie-pie Nayirah takes place as our all-time "CT With Two Legs."
-- In 1993, gun lobby group American Justice Federation published a list of 24 names with a claim that President Clinton had arranged their deaths. That's the rare manufactured CT that worked as a rumor, despite the source.
-- In 2002, Moon shot conspiracy nut Bart Sibrel yelled "coward and a liar" at astronaut Buzz Aldrin, which got him a punch in the snoot.
-- In 2009, the conversion to HDTV digital television signals was ascribed to home spy operations run by governments. The new television sets include cameras and microphones to keep a Big Brother eye on us. This CT is not clear on who or what is watching the billions of spy video/audio streams.
-- In 2011 two organized "9/11 Truther" groups showed up at Zuccotti Park. They inflicted their tales on the Occupiers and the crowds. They seemed to have memorized all of four slogans. The funniest of what they had to say was a claim that "explosives" set off a the bases of the Twin Towers on 9/11 had caused the two buildings to fall faster than the normal acceleration produced by gravity.
(Last I looked, explosions cause things to fly up. Not down. But physics does not apply in the mad mad world of 9/11 Truthers.)
-- In 2011, predictive programming got its own one-hour television drama. "Person of Interest." It is in its second season in 2012 with a lovely CT theme: "You are being watched. The government has a secret system: a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror, but it sees everything...."
CT is different from Bircher Madness. The fantasy elements take precedence and anti-democracy propaganda is only rarely involved in these CT patterns.
Bircher Madness makes repeated accusations that democratic government is untrustworthy, a threat to life and family values, and generally not what it seems to be. Democracy, itself, is the enemy.
Here's a sample of Bircher Madness topics off today's jbs.org web site:
-- Government Attitude Towards Elderly Leads to Euthanasia
-- Oppose Ratification of the UN Treaty on Disability Rights
-- Voter Fraud
-- Signs of a Declining Economy
-- Russia Rising
-- Communism Isn't Dead
-- Nobel Prize Goes to EU. Communist President of EU Commission Thankful.
-- Arab Unrest and Voter Fraud (in America somehow)
-- Ron Paul Drummed Out of Republican Party
-- Questions about the Aurora Colorado Movie Shooting
-- Attack on Christianity and Restore Religious Freedom in America
-- United Nations Ordering U.S. Troops to War
-- Long-term Goal of a United Nations Standing Army Behind the Syria Solution
They consider "Corruption of the Republican Party" in terms of helping to govern the country along with democrats.
Compare/contrast with topic sentences off the video at the InfoWars web site:
It doesn't take severe paranoia to fall for Bircher-style propaganda. Moderate paranoid personality disorder could get people to hook up with parts of this mess:
1.) There was a second shooter. Probably a government official, because witnesses say he was seated in the front of the car.
2.) The medical examiner's report is a lie.
3.) All the witnesses are hired actors.
4.) The witnesses are actors on the basis of 'suspicious' behavior.
5.) Photo morphing shows Emilie Parker wasn't shot at Sandy Hook, but is seen later with President Obama.
6.) The 'parents' are actors hired from CrisisActors.com
7.) Claims that FEMA was holding drills 20 minutes away in preparation for the tragedy so they could quickly respond.
8.) Victoria Soto's Facebook tribute was created days before she actually died.
This is Bircher stuff, not simple CT craziness. JBS focus on tearing down democracy takes precedence. The story line attacks the medical examiner, an unnamed "government official" assassin, "actors" and unnamed other parties.
There is no effort to make the story line believable.
The Far Right learned from Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s that they do not have to tell the truth. His lists of communists were frauds. These people lie and lie and no one is going to tear 'em up. Mitt Romney applied that knowledge in 1968 when his driving killed Leola Anderson. He woke up the next morning lying his ass off, blaming Bishop Jean Vilnet, the other driver.
"No Apology" is Romney's autobiography. No shame, no sense of decency go along with that.
They're Birchers, the lot of them. Know it or not. Freaks and liars.
Thankfully America has President Obama to do right by the Sandy Hook survivors and the memory of the victims. Also to do right by democracy.