This Week In Crazy: Net Neutrality Will Kill Us All

This Week In Crazy: Net Neutrality Will Kill Us All

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. Bill O’Reilly

Doesn’t it seem like War on Christmas season starts earlier every year?

Thanksgiving is still two weeks away, but on Wednesday’s edition of The O’Reilly Factor, cantankerous Fox News host Bill O’Reilly declared that “the first salvo this season in the ongoing War on Christmas” has been fired, “because a Muslim group did something.”

The debate centered around the Montgomery County school board’s decision to eliminate all references to religious holidays from its public school calendar. The board made the move in response to Muslim families’ request that Eid al-Adha be classified as an official holiday, just like Christmas or Rosh Hashana.

Although O’Reilly is usually an outspoken defender of religious freedom, his sympathy did not extend to these Muslims.

“Montgomery County caved in,” he complained. “You know, Christmas, and Easter, and Passover, these have a Judeo-Christian tradition in our country. So they just wiped out all of our traditions because of these people.” He went on to note that he would have put the holiday on the calendar — but refused to let people take it as an off-day.

This latest skirmish comes as something of a surprise considering that last December, O’Reilly bragged that the War on Christmas had been won. Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time that Fox News prematurely declared victory in an unnecessary war against Muslims.

4. Sandy Rios

Screenshot/Youtube

Screenshot: YouTube

Unlike the Montgomery County school system, President Obama hasn’t yet had the chance to wage war on Christmas. Probably because he’s too busy waging war on Thanksgiving!

On Thursday edition of her radio show, the American Family Association’s Sandy Rios slammed Obama for ruining Thanksgiving by considering executive action to reform the immigration system.

“Remember Obamacare was finally voted in on Christmas Eve? This is what they do because they have no regard for — I’m not saying Thanksgiving is sacred, but it’s sacred in the sense that people are thankful, bow before God, celebrate the holidays with their families. At least Americans used to, but the left doesn’t, that’s not so much important to them,” she said.

“What’s important to them is having their way and altering and changing this country as aggressively as they possibly can, no matter what it takes.”

Right Wing Watch has the audio:

That’s classic Obummer: Ruin Thanksgiving, but leave Eid al-Adha untouched.
3. Breitbart News

When President Obama announced that he would nominate U.S. attorney Loretta Lynch to be the next attorney general, the right-wing media pounced on the news.

“[T]he prosecutor has a long career built of some high-profile cases but there is one case Lynch was involved in that few are talking about,” Breitbart News writer Warner Todd Huston reported on Saturday. “Lynch was a part of Bill Clinton’s Whitewater probe defense team in 1992.”

One day later, Breitbart Senior Editor-at-Large Joe Pollak explored the political impact of Huston’s scoop, writing that “the connection to Whitewater ought to provide additional fodder for Republicans during Lynch’s confirmation hearings.”

There’s only one problem: As Media Matterspointed out, Breitbart was attacking the wrong Loretta Lynch.

Breitbart lives in a color blind world (Image via Media Matters)

Breitbart lives in a colorblind world (Image via Media Matters)

The Loretta Lynch on the left did in fact work for Clinton’s defense team in 1992, but she is not slated to lead the Justice Department. Breitbart acknowledged the error with the most unintentionally hilarious correction you’ll ever see, before removing the article altogether on Monday. But by that time, several other outlets had picked up the lie.

(Regular readers of This Week In Crazy were surely shocked by WorldNetDaily’s shoddy fact checking.)

Meanwhile, even with the Whitewater myth debunked, right-wing radio host Michael Savage is still calling for the Senate to block Lynch’s nomination. As he sees it, her name is a bad omen, because “a lynch mob is about to take over” — not to mention the fact that “she was picked by the vile Al Sharpton.”

“She had no business in the Attorney General’s office; she is an extreme left-wing ideologue,” he warned. “If he puts this one in, we’re going to have two years of Hell in this country.”

It’s probably a good thing that Republicans have given up on winning minority votes as part of their minority outreach.

2. Alex Jones & Phyllis Schlafly

On Monday, Cold War champion Phyllis Schlafly and fake-war enthusiast Alex Jones came together for a meeting of the paranoid minds on Jones’ InfoWars program.

It went about as well as you might imagine.

First, Jones and Schlafly honored veterans day by ripping the military. Jones worried that the government is “trying to twist the military into a domestic force” designed to “go after the Tea Party.” But, as usual, Schlafly was more concerned about gender politics.

“I don’t have any respect for the military who send women into combat,” she lamented.

“It’s a war on reality,” Jones concurred. “Men can’t make babies, and men are ugly, and women look good. There are differences.”

But that wasn’t all; the pair also found time to attack President Obama for doing too much to fight the Ebola virus.

“He seems to think that he’s some kind of king, who can do whatever he wants,” Schlafly complained. “He wants $6 billion so he can set up a plan to stop Ebola in West Africa. Now we didn’t elect him for that and Congress, which holds the purse strings, they shouldn’t give him the money.”

How dare Obama try to stop Ebola from spreading, just like Phyllis Schlafly demanded!

1. Glenn Beck

When President Obama spoke out in favor of net neutrality this week, it did not take long for most Republicans to go from ignoring the issue to deciding that it is an urgent threat to American freedom. But — with apologies to Senator Ted Cruz — nobody lost their mind quite like this week’s “winner,” Glenn Beck.

On Wednesday, Beck made a spirited case against net neutrality, arguing that it is “the global warming of the internet,” and claiming that it would allow internet service providers to restrict access to his content — apparently unaware that this is quite literally what the policy is intended to prevent. But things only got weirder from there.

On Thursday, Beck showed a clip of protesters blocking FCC chairman Tom Wheeler from leaving his driveway on Monday morning. According to Beck, this can only mean one thing: Open internet radicals are literally coming to kill us all.

“I am begging America to listen to me. Please listen to me. You are dealing with revolutionaries,” Beck exclaimed. “Revolutionaries will come, and they will pull you out of your car and shoot you. They will pull out of your office, your bank, they will pull you out of your plush political office, they will pull you out of your anchor chair, they will pull you out of wherever you are when they decide revolution is here and you’ve betrayed the revolution.”

“This is a harbinger,” he added. “Wake up. Wake up. They’re playing by different rules. They’re not playing by all the rules you think they are. Wake up. Please, dear God, wake up before it’s too late.”

Beck claims that he was cured of a rare neurological disorder that “has made [him] look crazy,” but if the video above is any indication, he may want to seek a second opinion.

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!

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