Pretty nuts.
I had forgotten that Sen. Rand Paul was
an Alex Jones acolyte.
In 2010, before winning his Senate seat, Paul sat for an interview with Luke Rudkowski, a libertarian YouTube personality who specializes in quizzing political leaders about the plot to establish a "one-world socialist government." Rudkowski asked what Paul knew of the Bilderberg Group, a collection of government and business leaders whose annual conference is a favorite target of conspiracy-mongers. Paul replied, "Only what I've learned from Alex Jones." [...]
Paul described the group to Rudkowski in unequivocally Jonesian terms, as "very wealthy people, who I think manipulate and use government to their own personal advantage. They want to make it out like world government will be good for humanity. But guess what? World government is good for their pocketbook."
So apparently the Rand Paul apple doesn't far fall from the Ron Paul tree—oh, and Rand is also a fan of the theory that our government is conspiring to combine the North American nations into one nation and currency, of course.
That pretty much sums up the problem with the modern Republican Party. Their most influential voices are nearly all conspiracy theorists who demand policies that will subvert imaginary threats. You've got the people convinced Muslims have infiltrated the government, you've got the people certain that the government is hoarding everything from ammunition to "disposable coffins" in preparation for something, and you've got the huge arc of people certain that the United Nations is this close to overthrowing America, which is akin to saying your local Walmart is this close to being overthrown by a plastic fern in the manager's office.
There's also the question of how we've come to be so well-stocked with former medical doctors who believe thoroughly crazy things. Where do they come up with these people? As it turns out, via a fringe group called the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a veritable John Birch Society of the medical profession. They're some of the people behind the current Ebola-will-kill-us-all theories.
[I]t turns out the AAPS is a conspiracy theory group founded in 1943 "to fight socialized medicine and to fight the government takeover of medicine."
They've been around ever since opposing Social Security, Medicare and various other government programs. And they cropped up again as a player in the Tea Party-infused opposition to Obamacare in 2009-10. But they were on to Obama much earlier. Like in 2008 when they suggested that President Obama was not simply a gifted orator but actually "deliberately using the techniques of neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a covert form of hypnosis developed by Milton Erickson, M.D.?"
The group's journal has also claimed that humans have not contributed to climate change, that HIV does not cause AIDS, that abortion causes breast cancer, that undocumented immigrants are flooding the US with leprosy and various other claims that are either discredited within the actual medical community, based on conspiracy theories or simply insane.
So who would be a member of a group like that? Rand Paul, of course.
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There's talk of him running for president, you know. That would be pretty damn funny, except for the part where a sizable chunk of the entire Republican base, fed chunks of these various conspiracy theories on a daily basis by Fox News, is perfectly willing to believe all of this stuff. The line between fringe groups and Reince Priebus Republicanism has been blurred to the point of near-invisibility as the party (
did I mention Fox News?) seeks to embrace any scrap of hokum that could usefully inflame their base. Whether it be Rand Paul, or Ben Carson, or (sigh) apparently every last Texas Republican, it's the Alex Jones Republicans who are in charge. If all of that has resulted in a national leadership that has proven itself something between incompetent and incoherent, that's hardly a surprise.
