Extremist pastors, conspiracy mongers, and the greatest political speech since Washington. Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:
5. Kevin Swanson
Remember Kevin Swanson?
He is the anti-gay, anti-women bigot who last November played host to gracious presidential candidate Ted Cruz, by vowing to smear his body in cow manure if his son turned out to be gay and then describing the state of marriage equality in America thusly: “People are carving happy faces on the sores! That’s not a nice thing to do! Don’t you dare carve happy faces on open, pussy sores!!” (Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal were also in attendance.)
Anyway, Swanson is back with the hysterical gay bashing, asserting in his radio show Wednesday that “homosexuals love each other” just like “cannibals love their victims” — that is to say, because “they taste good.”
Swanson is one of the most extreme anti-LGBT preachers and activists in America; his National Religious Liberties Conference last November, at which Cruz spoke in November, was aptly characterized by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow as a “kill-the-gays rally,” since Swanson told his flock that gays deserve death. Cruz never really apologized for appearing at Swanson’s event, and Swanson is just one of several religious extremists in Cruz’s corner.
Hat tip and audio courtesy of Right Wing Watch
4. Curt Schilling
The former ESPN host has been on something of a non-apology tour lately. Following his termination from the sports network for posting anti-transgender memes on his Facebook, Schilling has been making the rounds on conservative radio to defend his actions and his beliefs. And while he’s at it, he likes to sound off on any number of conservative issues bugging him.
Schilling sat down this week for his first long-form interview since his sacking. Talking to Breitbart News Patriot Forum (aired on SiriusXM Thursday morning), Schilling averred that Hillary Clinton “should be in a maximum security prison” because her use of a private email server “was a felony.”
He won applause in the studio when he said Donald Trump was the “only [candidate] he could see in the White House,” the only caveats being his bad habit of describing women in crude terms and the fact that “I need to start seeing him act like a leader.”
Pressed on details of Clinton’s malfeasance, Schilling just kept insisting it was a felony, though he could not point to specifics. “I don’t know if it’s hubris or it’s ignorance,” he said. “I don’t care. But what she did was a felony.”
3. Billy Corgan
Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan has had it with political correctness. Speaking to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his InfoWars show this week, the alt-rocker went as far as to compare “social justice warriors” to the Ku Klux Klan and a cult of “Maoists.”
“Social Justice Warrior” or SJW is a (usually pejorative) term to refer to the far-left activists on college campuses or people online who proclaim their alliance with progressive causes. They can be rude, they can be unreasonable, they can go too far.
What they do not do is wage a decades-long campaign of domestic terrorism and violent disenfranchisement on their opponents, literally imprisoning and murdering people, and so forth. Which makes Corgan’s comments all the more curious.
“There’s two schools of thought,” Corgan explained. “One is they’re gone. They’re Maoists. They have the Little Red Book in their hand. You’re not gonna get them back…The only thing that’s going to adjust their ideological fixation is reality.”
Jones offered that they were not unlike the KKK in the way they used identity politics to justify their antagonism toward other people — and Corgan agreed.
“If you could go back to Selma 1932 and the Klan member spitting in some person of color’s face, don’t you think that guy thought he was right, too? … How is this any different?” Corgan asked.
Check out video of the full interview above.
2. Alex Jones
But of course the only thing consistently more out of touch than Alex Jones’ guests is Alex Jones himself.
And the shock-jock-in-chief did not fail to deliver a characteristically risible and magnificently insane response to Beyoncé’s release of her visual album Lemonade. There’s plenty of meaty, well-considered criticism and discussion of this latest work on the internet, and I encourage you to read it. But Jones’ reactionary screed is less useful for what it says about Beyoncé and her music than for what it reveals about the addled inner workings of Jones’ thought process.
The radio host is insistent that Lemonade represents an insidious CIA plot and to his credit, he begins his little (well, nearly 20-minute) video monologue on the subject that confessing that the story is difficult to report because it’s “so crazy.”
Beyoncé’s latest is an example of “domestic propaganda,” bought and paid for by the intelligence community to foment “a race war.” He points to the use of “urban terrorism” imagery (a jilted Bey smashing cars with a baseball bat) as evidence supporting his claims.
This recalls the senseless outrage that Beyoncé’s “Formation” video and Super Bowl halftime performance provoked in the far-right commentariat from Jones and others, like TheBlaze’s Tomi Lahren who threw a jejune little fit, claiming that the song was alienating to white girls.
1. Ann Coulter
Ann Coulter was early and vocal in her fawning support for Donald Trump.
Now that the candidate is on the verge of clinching the GOP nomination, more and more Republicans are flushing their principles and lining up behind him. But Coulter was a Trump groupie before it was cool. The only way to defend her turf as The Donald’s #1 bootlicker is to out-scream, out-crazy, and outshine everyone else with rabid, frothing support more excessive and puerile than anyone else’s.
So where others saw Trump deliver a nonsensical, rambling, self-contradictory, illiterate-in-the-ways-of-the-world speech of foreign policy Wednesday, Coulter saw literally the greatest address on the subject in 220 years.
GREATEST FOREIGN POLICY SPEECH SINCE WASHINGTON’S FAREWELL ADDRESS.
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) April 27, 2016
WATCH THE WHOLE SPEECH – F-ING AMAZING. THE CANDIDATE I’VE BEEN DREAMING OF.
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) April 27, 2016
And even though nobody ever asked, now we know exactly what Ann sees and hears when she dreams.
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Illustration: DonkeyHotey via Flickr
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