RWW’s Paranoia-Rama takes a look at five of the week’s most absurd conspiracy theories from the Right.
While GOP presidential candidates continue to get away with telling obvious fabrications, right-wing media are still intent on exploiting the Paris attacks to advance their own political interests.
5) God Behind Paris Attacks
Earlier this month, three Republican presidential candidates courted pastor and radio host Kevin Swanson , notorious for his calls to execute gay people and denunciations of “Harry Potter” and “Frozen,” at his National Religious Liberties Conference in Iowa. With the summit now over, Swanson returned to hosting his daily radio program, where he addressed on Thursday the recent terrorist attack in Paris, which he believed was “a message from God.”
More specifically, Swanson alleged that the concertgoers at the Bataclan theater were attending “a worship service to the Devil” and received their punishment in the form of the terrorist attack:
Swanson wasn’t alone in linking God to the deadly attacks.
Televangelist Jonathan Cahn suggested that the tragedy was God’s punishment for France’s support for Palestinian statehood and the legalization of same-sex marriage.
4) It’s A Conspiracy!
Donald Trump is still defending his totally baseless claim that “thousands and thousands” of Muslim-Americans in Jersey City came out to celebrate the 9/11 terrorist attacks, telling George Stephanopoulos that the media won’t corroborate his assertion because it is “not politically correct for you to talk about it.”
Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, went so far as to claim that the media is deliberately withholding footage of the nonexistent Jersey City celebrations in order to undermine Trump’s candidacy and help elect “an establishment candidate.”
3) Holocaust Coming To America
In a not-at-all-alarmist column titled “Obama Is Importing The Holocaust,” Don Feder of the World Congress of Families attacked the Obama administration’s plan to bring in Syrian refugees as “Operation Jihad Lift,” warning that the refugees are “the kind who fly planes into buildings and shoot up Parisian theaters.”
Even orphans, Feder wrote, should be barred from the U.S., since “in Gaza, 6-year-olds are being trained for the next Intifada.”
After falsely claiming that the “Tsarnaev brothers were admitted as refugees from Chechnya,” Feder warned that with “Operation Jihad Lift, Obama has found an even better weapon than open borders to use against the country he hates.”
“Corrosive hatred and nihilistic violence follow Muslims wherever they go,” he wrote. “In America, the sea isn’t yet big enough to produce the waves that wash across Europe. But it’s coming.”
2) Sharia In Michigan
While Dearborn, Michigan, has long been the main target right-wing conspiracy theorists’ Sharia panic, the nearby city of Hamtramck is now witnessing similar attacks after Muslim candidates won a majority of seats on its city council.
To clear the air and reassure the nation that Hamtramck hasn’t fallen to Sharia law, Mayor Karen Majewski appeared Monday on “CNN Newsroom,” where host Carol Costello kicked off the interview by asking: “You govern a majority Muslim-American city. Are you afraid?”
Majewski said that she is not afraid and that Hamtramck does not have a Muslim majority, just that a majority of councilmembers are Muslims.
1) Huckabee Just Lies
Much as a certain presidential candidate is making stuff up about a huge 9/11 celebration in New Jersey, Mike Huckabee has also decided to manufacture nonexistent events in an effort to help his campaign.
Huckabee told the audience at a social conservative presidential forum on Friday that the Obama administration took action this week to begin deporting a German family that sought asylum in the U.S. to avoid Germany’s homeschooling laws, proving that “there is a war on the Christian faith in this country that is being carried out by this administration.”
In reality, the Obama administration has taken no such action against the family, and the homeschooling legal group representing the family told us that they didn’t have any knowledge that their clients are about to face deportation.
But maybe Huckabee knows more about the family’s legal status than their own lawyers.
