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This Week In Crazy: Everyone’s Got Secession Fever

This Week In Crazy: Everyone’s Got Secession Fever

Donald Trump is railing against immigrants trying to get into the country, meanwhile we’ve got conservative activists and officers of the court angling to get out. Misogyny, paranoia, xenophobia, oh my! Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the wildest attacks, conspiracy theories, and other loony behavior from the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:

5. Lee Bright

LeeBrightThe bill to remove the Confederate flag from South Carolina state grounds made its way relatively briskly through the state legislature and on to Gov. Nikki Haley’s desk — where she signed it Thursday afternoon.

That’s not to say there weren’t some snags. In the House, Representative Michael A. Pitts (R) introduced several amendments in an effort to protract the debates and stall the bill’s passage. Not a single amendment passed, and the House voted overwhelmingly in favor of the bill shortly after 1 a.m. Thursday.

A few days prior to Pitts’ filibuster, Republican South Carolina state senator Lee Bright took to the floor to go on an extended rant — that had very little to do with the Confederate flag. He enjoined his fellow senators to “take a stand” against the “tyranny of five judges,” and the godless agenda of a president who dares to sing “Amazing Grace” one moment and then light up the White House with “abomination colors” the next.

Bright choked back a sob as he said: “We can rally together and talk about a flag all we want but the Devil is taking control of this land and we’re not stopping him!”

Raw Story has the video:

Unmoved by Bright’s free association, the state Senate passed the bill 37-3. And the flag’s set to come down Friday morning at 10 a.m.

ViaRaw Story

Next: Jade Helm Reactionaries 

4. Jade Helm Reactionaries

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

It’s been a while since we checked in on the federal government’s plot to conquer Texas.

With all the hullabaloo over marriage equality, South Carolina conceding the Civil War after a century-and-a-half delay, and Donald Trump’s endless supply of hot air, I guess it just fell through the cracks. I’m happy to report that Jade Helm 15 — either a series of war games or an Obama-masterminded plot to take over the Lone Star State, depending on which side of the sanity fulcrum you fall on — is coming along nicely.

And so Texas is taking steps to make sure it remains sovereign, self-sufficient, and backed by shiny, shiny gold.

Texas is the only state that still maintains a stockpile of gold — “approximately 5,600 gold bars worth around $650 million,” according to the AP — and now they’ve decided they want it all back within their borders. (The bullion is currently in a Manhattan bank.)

According to the Inquistr, “Texas politicians who support the decision to move the gold to Texas have tried to downplay allegations that they are anticipating the possibility that developments could lead to a secession bid.”

Meanwhile, Chuck Norris has put Obama on notice not to “infringe” on Texas with his military exercise thingy.

And Alex Jones — the talk-radio host who got the ball rolling on much of the conspiracy theorizing when this started — has said: “This is going to be hellish. … Now this is just a cover for deploying the military on the streets. … This is an invasion.”

Long before Texas secedes from the Union, it appears to have seceded from reality.

Next: Roy Moore and Randall Terry

3. Roy Moore and Randall Terry

RoyMooreAndRandallTerrySpeaking of secession, we’ve got a whole bunch of people so worked up over the Obergefell ruling that they’re ready to pack their bags rather than follow the law of the land.

The problem is some of these people are tasked with enforcing said law. That includes the county clerk in Kentucky recently caught on camera refusing to grant any marriage licenses rather than grant them to gay couples; the Texas attorney general who said he would support clerks who took such action; the Texas clerk who posted her own July 4 Declaration, this one in “Defense of Natural Marriage,” in which she asserted her moral and lawful right to be immoral and unlawful.

Conservative activist Randall Terry wants to go a step further: Just secede. Just say “we’ve had enough of this.”

At least Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, with whom Terry sat down for a conversation Monday, appears to be the relatively cooler head here. Moore said it’s “not time to secede” just yet — but officers of the court do have to “take a stand” and not “obey an unlawful order” — invoking the Nuremberg logic that Nazi soldiers had the duty to honor a “higher law.” Yes, really.

Moore asserted that marriage equality is “going to destroy the nation.”

“Then why not get out of the nation?” Terry asks.

Right Wing Watch has the video:

Via Right Wing WatchandThe New Civil Rights Movement.

Next: Peter Nolan

2. Peter Nolan

nolan (1)Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) are an especially odious species of twit that has crawled out from the slime. Given an occasional brush with legitimacy — as when MRAs under the gentler title “suffragent” get wheeled onto Fox News, most of them exist in dark, rat-trap corners of the internet to sling their venom at anyone in sight.

Peter Andrew Nolan is one such MRA. According to We Hunted The Mammoth, a blog that “tracks and mocks the New Misogyny online,” Nolan has been celebrating a little prematurely the legitimization of the murder of women, claiming that Australian law has made it so.

According to a series of tweets directed at various handles, including that of actress Denise Richards, Nolan believes that the “time for talk is over. The time for men killing women to get your attention has arrived.”

This goes on at some length, and you can view screenshots of the various horrifying tweets here. (Nolan’s Twitter account has been suspended.)

Nolan is also an acolyte of the Sovereign Citizen movement, and so uses unconventional spelling and strange symbols in his name because he believes it undercuts the government’s jurisdiction over him. (He currently goes by the name Joschua-Boehm©.)

Lest anyone is encouraged to dismiss him outright as a troll, We Hunted The Mammoth warns that Nolan

does indeed believe that he is at war with Ireland and Australia, that murdering women is legal in both countries, and that he has the right to enforce these claims of his as best he can.

This isn’t the first time Nolan has justified or indeed celebrated violence against women. His declarations of “war” are not new. He’s offered some (barely) qualified praise for far-right mass murderer Anders Breivik, and at one point he warned any women thinking of commenting on his laughable Facebook ripoff MAN-BOOK that he just might just kill them for it.

But these recent Tweets are pretty brazen, even by his standards. He is clearly a threat to women, as well as to politicians and government employees regardless of gender.

ViaWe Hunted The Mammoth

(Please note: This page is called “This Week In Crazy,” but WHTM correctly notes that “mental illness does not cause hate.” Nolan’s vile ideology and threats perhaps warrant more sober consideration than the light touch I’ve given them here.)

Next: Michael Savage

1. Michael Savage

Screenshot: YouTube

Garrulous gasbag and radio host Michael Savage is the patron saint of trolls, reliably churning out the crazy for this page like a well-oiled machine of madness. If he did not exist, I would have to invent him, but I’m not disturbed enough to recreate his mental aerobics, in which everything can be connected to everything else and it all ends with the same solemn condemnations: Grr, Obama. Grr, liberals. 

His unhinged arias are paeans to paranoia. One of his latest — from his show Tuesday night — follows a chain of association from welfare programs to — you guessed it — Holocaust-level injustice occurring on our own soil.

“It’s all well and good, the welfare state,” he says. “Until you can’t afford it anymore. And guess what happens then. The country collapses!”

Then you get what the government has always wanted: civil war, insurrection, martial law — “And guess what happens then.”

Yep, “internment camps.”

“And guess what happens then.” And here Savage takes aim at liberals who are content to let this all transpire because, after all, liberals assume that they won’t be the ones locked up in camps. Because liberals think they’re “all powerful” and “above the law.”

Liberals won’t be subjected to the New Obama Order — only Christians and veterans, Savage insists, will be gathered up and locked away. Liberals have what Savage calls the “Army of the Night” behind them, which consists of “illegal alien gangs.”

“We understand your entire plan!” Savage puts liberals on notice. Especially you, Obama, “the insane-est person on the planet.”

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/213971800″ params=”color=ff5500″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

“This is what liberalism brings you,” Savage concludes. “Insanity and murder — and death and disease. It’s the opposite of what they sold you!”

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/213971863″ params=”color=ff5500″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

I listened to your show, Mike. I tried — I really tried — to connect the dots, but all I got was a page of scribbles and a ringing in my ears.

Via Right Wing Watch

Image above: Jesse 1974 via Flickr

The Tea Party Falls Flat: How Lindsey Graham Survived A Right-Wing Challenge

The Tea Party Falls Flat: How Lindsey Graham Survived A Right-Wing Challenge

When South Carolinians head to the polls on Tuesday, it’s very likely that the Tea Party’s years-long effort to unseat Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) will end with a whimper.

Polls suggest that Graham is will crush his six primary challengers; according to The Huffington Post’spolling average of the race, the two-term incumbent is on track to clear the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a June 24 runoff. Even if he does not, it’s hard to imagine any of the other candidates making up a 40-point deficit in just two weeks.

Graham’s impending victory may come as something of a surprise, considering that he has long been one of the Tea Party’s top targets (indeed, he has been repeatedly censured by local party committees for being insuficiently conservative). But there are several reasons that the right’s quest to replace the supposed RINO seems destined for failure.

First, no serious challenger ever emerged. Although Graham’s opponents hoped to recruit a high-profile conservative such as Rep. Trey Gowdy or Rep. Mick Mulvaney into the race, the field of challengers ended up being led by state senator Lee Bright — a genuine extremist who has argued that welfare programs are “all sin,” that IRS “Brown Shirts” are planning to enforce the Affordable Care Act with AR-15 rifles, and that South Carolinians may have to “use the Second Amendment” to fight a second Civil War, among many other controversial positions. The other challengers struggled with issues of their own; businesswoman Nancy Mace angered supporters of Governor Nikki Haley (R) through her professional partnership with blogger Will Folks (who accused Haley of having an extramarital affair), and businessman Richard Cash never expanded the scope of his campaign past social issues — his highest-profile moment came via an ad bragging about having been arrested 10 times in various anti-abortion protests.  Unlike in Mississippi or Kentucky, Tea Party supporters in South Carolina never found a single candidate around whom they could rally.

Graham also took great pains to protect his right flank throughout the campaign. Although he drew the ire of the right for co-sponsoring immigration reform legislation in 2013, he has generally stuck to the party line, voting with the majority of the Republican caucus 80 percent of the time. And he has provided plenty of red meat to placate his party’s right wing, leading the GOP’s heated criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi attack, and even suggesting that he could bring articles of impeachment against the president.

Perhaps most significantly, Graham’s fundraising blew his opponents out of the water. The incumbent raised more than $9 million for the race, while none of his challengers managed to raise even $1 million. That massive advantage allowed Graham to control the airwaves and out-organize his opponents on the ground, all but killing their hopes of engineering an upset win. The Tea Party groups that have spent years calling for Graham’s ouster declined to put their money where their mouths are in the Republican primary, and as a result they will almost certainly have to live with another six-year term for the supposed moderate they love to hate.

Photo: Secretary of Defense via Flickr

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Meet Lee Bright, The Tea Partier Who May Be Too Extreme For Even South Carolina

Meet Lee Bright, The Tea Partier Who May Be Too Extreme For Even South Carolina

South Carolina state senator Lee Bright (R), who is running a Tea Party-backed challenge to Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in South Carolina’s Republican primary, is a magnet for controversy.

Bright most recently grabbed headlines on Monday’s edition of Fox News Radio’s The Alan Colmes Show, when he suggested that teachers should be allowed to carry machine guns on school grounds:

COLMES: So [teachers] shouldn’t have machine guns?
BRIGHT: I would think a teacher protecting a school grounds should be able to carry whatever she can carry legally.
COLMES: So should machine guns be legal to carry?
BRIGHT: The Second Amendment is pretty clear. It says the right to carry arms should not be infringed. […]
COLMES: So you should be able to have any gun you want?
BRIGHT: Well, I don’t see how the government can regulate it.

The discussion was not purely academic; Bright has authored bills to expand the number of guns in schools, and has repeatedly argued that South Carolina should be able to nullify federal gun laws. Additionally, as Think Progress‘ Igor Volsky points out, the Supreme Court has ruled that the government can, in fact, limit “dangerous and unusual” weapons (such as machine guns made after the passage of the 1986 Firearms’ Owners Protection Act).

Bright’s extreme opposition to tougher gun laws is just one of many positions that puts him far outside of the mainstream, even in staunchly Republican South Carolina. Among other examples, Bright has:

  • Argued that welfare programs are “all sin” and “legalized plunder.”
  • Explained his demand that food stamps be cut by insisting that “able-bodied people, if they don’t work, they shouldn’t eat.”
  • Warned that “Brown Shirts” from the Internal Revenue Service are going to enforce the Affordable Care Act with AR-15 semiautomatic rifles.
  • Insisted that “FEMA is a scam,” and that the government should have no role in providing disaster relief.
  • Suggested that Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor might want to dissolve the states, and that President Obama wants to become a king.
  • Threatened that South Carolinians may have to “use the Second Amendment” against the government, adding that “I want to lay down my life for my liberty just like my forefathers did.”

In addition to all of his overheated rhetoric, Bright holds at least $1.4 million in debt from a failed trucking business — a disclosure that rather undercuts his efforts to paint himself as a fiscal conservative.

In other words, Bright is an opposition researcher’s dream candidate. And yet it’s plausible that he could wind up in the U.S. Senate.

Early polling of South Carolina’s Republican primary finds Graham with a comfortable lead. The most recent survey, from Gravis Marketing, finds Graham with a big 54 to 10 percent advantage over Bright; Charleston businesswoman Nancy Mace has 6 percent support, followed by 2010 congressional candidate Richard Cash at 5 percent, and attorney Bill Connor at 2 percent. 23 percent are undecided.

The poll does contain warning signs for the incumbent, however. When asked if they would support a “Tea Party” challenger to Senator Graham, 39 percent of voters said “yes,” while 37 percent said “no,” and 24 percent were undecided. This suggests that if any of Graham’s challengers can consolidate support on the right, there is plenty of room for their numbers to grow. That unsettling thought could become reality for Graham this summer; if he fails to crack 50 percent in the June 10 primary, he would face the second-place finisher in a one-on-one runoff election two weeks later.

If Bright can force a runoff and carry the Tea Party banner against Graham — who has long been a target of scorn from the right — then the race could narrow rapidly. And even if Graham wins the runoff (to be sure, his robust fundraising and unmatched name recognition would make him the strong favorite even in a head-to-head matchup with Bright), he may have to shift far enough to the right to leave him vulnerable against a strong Democratic challenger.

Thankfully for Republicans, no such challenger exists as of now. It would take an exceptionally strong Democratic candidate to win any statewide election in South Carolina, and the only Democrat in the race — Jay Stamper, an entrepreneur who pleaded guilty to three felony charges related to the illegal sale of securities in 2006 — is unlikely to become that candidate.

There is still plenty of time until the March 30 deadline to file for the Senate race. If Graham shows even a hint of vulnerability, and gives Bright even the slightest chance at winning the Republican nomination, then Democrats would be wise to find a stronger candidate to run against what could be an incredibly weak GOP nominee.

Screenshot: YouTube