Tag: kevin swanson
This Week In Crazy: The CIA-Beyonce Plot Revealed

This Week In Crazy: The CIA-Beyonce Plot Revealed

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

Next: Curt Schilling

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.”

Next: Billy Corgan 

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. 

Next: Alex Jones

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.

Next: Mad Ann 

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.

And even though nobody ever asked, now we know exactly what Ann sees and hears when she dreams.

Illustration: DonkeyHotey via Flickr

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!Get This Week In Crazy delivered to your inbox every Friday, by signing up for our daily email newsletter.

This Week In Crazy: Come, Armageddon

This Week In Crazy: Come, Armageddon

Despite prior warnings to this effect, which turned out to be premature, conservative right-wingers are quite sure that this time it really is the End Times.

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

2015-11-06-kevin-swanson-cow-manure-right-wing-watch-screen-grab-640So much has been made of pastor Kevin Swanson’s “kill-the-gays rally,” as Rachel Maddow aptly characterized it, that I almost hesitate to include him on this week’s list. But if a crazed man announcing that, were he invited to his gay son’s wedding, he’d “sit in cow manure” and “spread it all over my body” doesn’t make the TWIC page, then the TWIC page has no meaning.

Swanson’s epic caterwaul continues: “I’m not laughing! I’m grieving! I’m mourning!” He characterized gay people as being riddled with sores, and wailed that “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!!”

This mewling, hysterical tantrum was part of Swanson’s protracted introduction of, improbably, three GOP presidential candidates — Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal — who attended the Des Moines rally in an apparent demonstration that the Iowan evangelical vote is so valuable a candidate will stoop to even the most shameful low. (While onstage, Cruz insisted that atheists and nonreligious people were unfit to be president — to rapturous applause.)

While he explained that homosexuality was a capital offense, Swanson stopped short of saying civil leaders should actually be the ones sentencing them to death — but only because “we need some time for homosexuals to repent.”

Of course, the candidates’ campaigns are already backpedaling: Huckabee is now saying he didn’t know what he was getting into, a pretty dubious claim — considering the bevy of material on Swanson’s history of hateful anti-gay, anti-women rhetoric that’s readily available online, and the fact that media outlets and watchdog groups were making a lot of noise about this last week.

But Jesus never used Google, so apparently neither does Huck.

Next: Pat Robertson

4. Pat Robertson

PatRobertsonScreenshotPat Robertson, the ill-tempered wax sculpture who hosts The 700 Club, has some hard words for anyone who thinks they can be both gay and Christian at the same time. (Hint: you can’t.)

Taking a question from a viewer on that subject on his show Tuesday, Robertson said that any such person would be “misguided and a hypocrite,” calling the trend of gay-friendly churches “the last stage of Gentile world apostasy.”

The only churches worth a damn, in Robertson’s view, are the ones that look on miscarried babies as God’s deliverance from future Hitlers, treat anorexia like a case of demonic possession, or believe that marriage equality will lead to Christians being forced into sodomy. Such sensible dogma.

Of course, Mad Pat isn’t the only one who believes the End Times are upon us…

ViaRight Wing Watch

Next: Michele Bachmann

3. Michele Bachmann

Michele BachmannThe former congresswoman who recently blamed floods in South Carolina on the nuclear deal with Iran, is off on another one of End-Is-Nigh kicks, espying portents of Armageddon in every news clipping and slice of fresh toast she comes across. “It’s literally day by day by day,” she said. “We’re seeing the fulfillment of scripture right in front of our eyes, even while we’re on the ground.”

On a recent taping of Family Research Council president Tony Perkins’ Washington Watch radio show, she encouraged Christian Americans to get busy ticking off their pre-apocalypse bucket list, among which items, she said, should be the conversion of as many Jews as possible.

Per Right Wing Watch, Bachmann said that Christians “recognize the shortness of the hour,

and that’s why we as a remnant want to be faithful in these days and do what it is that the Holy Spirit is speaking to each one of us, to be faithful in the Kingdom and to help bring in as many as we can — even among the Jews — share Jesus Christ with everyone that we possibly can because, again, He’s coming soon.

ViaRight Wing Watch

Next: Judge Scott Johansen

2. Judge Scott Johansen

Update below.

A Utah judge ordered Tuesday that the infant foster child of a married lesbian couple be removed and reassigned to a heterosexual couple. His decision was based entirely on the fact that the child’s foster parents were lesbian.

April Hoagland and Becky Peirce have been raising the child for the last three months, along with Peirce’s 12- and 14-year-old children, and they are joined in support by both the foster child’s state-appointed attorney and her biological mother, who does not wish to see the family broken up.

From KUTV:

The women, who are legally married and were approved as foster parents in Utah earlier this year after passing home inspections, background checks and interviews from DCFS [Utah Division of Child and Family Services], said the judge told them there was a lot of research that indicated children who are raised in same-sex parent homes do not do as well as children who are raised by heterosexual parents.

Judge Scott Johansen apparently did not actually name or cite the vague research on which he based his decision, and because this is a family court ruling, the court records have not been released. The New Civil Rights Movement notes that there is “no valid research that proves children raised by same-sex parents do not perform as well as children raise by different-sex parents,” and that the “most widely publicized study that claimed to show adult children raised by same-sex parents, authored by Mark Regnerus, has been thoroughly discredited by the scientific community.”

Johansen is same juvenile court judge who dispensed some eye-for-an-eye justice in 2012, when said he would reduce a 13-year-old girl’s sentence if her mother agreed to chop off her ponytail in the courtroom, and asked her to keep chopping to the satisfaction of the complainant.

Maybe there’s a reason we don’t rely on Old Testament justice anymore.

American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer was quick to voice his support for the judge’s ruling, raving about the “sexual purity” and “sexual integrity of our children” on his show Thursday, and affirming he was “100 percent standing behind” Johansen.

“We should never countenance policies that place children in same-sex households,” Fischer said, repeating the same debunked studies that Judge Johansen presumably invoked.

That would probably be enough to land Fischer on the list this week, however…

Next: Bryan Fischer

Update: Judge Johansen amended his decision Friday, saying that the DCFS did not have to take the infant child away from Hoagland and Peirce next week, as originally ordered. There is still a custody hearing scheduled for Dec. 4.

1. Bryan Fischer

BrianFischerThe folks at the American Family Association uploaded video of Bryan Fischer’s taping of his Wednesday radio show under the header “Wars with other nations not just military conflict but spiritual warfare.”

Talk about burying the lede. Don’t sell yourselves short, AFA. The torrent of verbal ipecac flowing from Fischer’s mouth this week is so much more revolting than that.

Fischer discusses the story of Babylon sacking Jerusalem, as told in the Book of Jeremiah. In Fischer’s gloss, the story of a pagan nation that became an instrument of God’s wrath has special bearing for modern-day America, because like Jerusalem of 587 B.C.E., we too have experienced a smiting in the form of an invasion of godless infidels. Fischer is referring, of course, to the attacks of September 11, 2001, which he characterizes as God’s “wake-up call” to a “Christian nation” to get its act together.

Fischer continued:

I believe — I’m not saying that I know this — God hasn’t told me this one way or another, but I think it’s possible that 9/11 was exactly that. That was God using an utterly pagan, godless, demonic religion and the followers of that utterly pagan, godless, and demonic religion to discipline a Christian nation that has entered into a covenant relationship with God. It’s God’s way of giving us a wake-up call and it’s god’s way of demonstrating that He will not be mocked…

Needless to say, there is no section of any U.S. history textbook (outside of Texas, anyway), which tells the story of how the founders entered into a covenant with the Christian God. But that’s small change — just a few weeks ago, Fischer actually argued that the Constitution gave states free rein to bulldoze mosques.

Number the stars, Bryan. So shall your fallacies be.

Image: US Department of Energy via Wiki

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It Gets Worse: More About Kevin Swanson, Anti-Gay And Anti-Women Talker — Host Of GOP Candidates

It Gets Worse: More About Kevin Swanson, Anti-Gay And Anti-Women Talker — Host Of GOP Candidates

One subject was conspicuously absent from the Republican debates on Tuesday night: The fact that the previous weekend, three of the candidates had attended a conference in Iowa run by a fringe religious-right minister who was actively advocating the death penalty for gays — and, oh, saying that if his son married a man, he would show up for the wedding and smear his body in cow manure.

The man in question is Kevin Swanson, a talk-radio host and conspiracy theorist who hosted “Freedom 2015: National Religious Liberties Conference,” an assembly for far-right conservative Christians that was well documented by Right Wing Watch.

Among the guest speakers were Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal — who were also invited candidates at Tuesday’s undercard debate — plus Ted Cruz, who was even on the main stage and is polling in the low double digits nationally.

A worst-of reel of highlights from Swanson’s event was shown this week on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, with Maddow wondering if any of those three GOP candidates would be asked about Swanson at the debate.

Maddow’s discussion of the event begins at the 5:55 mark below.

But if anything, Maddow missed a whole other raft of material on Swanson: His hatred of women who go to college and get jobs — instead of submitting to their husbands as God intended. His views on this point were memorably articulated when he and his radio co-host Dave Buehner went on a tear in early 2013, decrying feminism as the influence of evil, ugly women who are taking over society. (And they even implicated in Tea Party hero Sarah Palin into this — for having a husband to whom she does not submit, but instead makes him submit to her.)

Editor’s Note: The YouTube account of Right Wing Watch has been suspended by the site due to third-party complaints of copyright infringement, and so videos of the conference are temporarily unavailable. 

“Remember, the goal is to get that girl a job,” Swanson said, “because she needs no stinkin’ husband, she’s got the fascist corporation and government-mandated insurance programs and socialist welfare that will take care of her womb to tomb. Who needs a cotton-pickin’ husband? Who needs a family? That’s pretty much the worldview that’s dominating, my friends. That’s what the college is all about.”

Later in 2013, Swanson and Buehner railed against gay influences in the Girl Scouts of America, urging listeners not to buy those delicious temptations, Girl Scout Cookies. And this conversation also steered back to that whole women-in-college-and-getting-jobs calamity.

Buehner said, with Swanson in full agreement: “Keep the end goal in mind: Are you trying to create a woman who’s going to compete with men in the marketplace — or are you trying to create a woman who will be a helpmeet to a man, so he can compete in the marketplace?”

But we’re not done yet…

Swanson somehow tied up racism and sexism into one masterpiece of a rant: He hates Abraham Lincoln — whom he links directly to Karl Marx — for enslaving all of America under big government in 1865; and from there, he segues into an apologia for the genocides and mass sex slavery found in the Bible.

So there you are: The man with whom Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal were all proud to share a stage on the weekend before a nationally televised debate. Anything for a vote in Iowa, huh?

This Week In Crazy: Obama Tried To Nuke Charleston!

This Week In Crazy: Obama Tried To Nuke Charleston!

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. Sean Duffy and Andrea Tantaros
As all Americans on the East Coast know, this winter has been brutally cold and unusually snowy; in fact, schools in Easton, Massachusetts had so many snow days that the town moved to eliminate three religious holidays next year to avoid having to extend the school year well into the summer, as they’re doing in 2015.

Or at least that’s what they want you to think.

Fortunately for This Week In Crazy readers, the “one lucky guy” on the Monday edition of the Fox News trollfest Outnumbered — U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) — is here to expose the horrible truth about the liberal snow plot otherwise known as winter.

“That makes too much sense,” the Tea Party congressman and former Real World star said of the Easton school committee’s explanation for shortening the schedule. “Don’t let any good crisis go to waste, and if you want to take religion out of the public square, look at Boston and look at all the snow and say, ‘What a great reason now, we can take these religious holidays out of our school system.'”

Co-host Andrea Tantaros heartily agreed.

“I think the congressman hit the nail on the head,” she said. “This is what happens when liberal academic Boston meets ethnic Boston.”

Perhaps Duffy and Tantaros should look to the shining example of Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who recently demonstrated how snow can be turned against the liberal aggressors.

4. Bryan Fischer
When discredited right-wing author Ed Klein wrote an anonymously sourced column claiming that White House advisor Valerie Jarrett leaked Hillary Clinton’s email controversy to the press, it was only a matter of time until the fringe sank its teeth into the conspiracy theory.

As usual, Bryan Fischer led the charge. On the Tuesday edition of his show, Fischer took Klein’s “report” one step further, by explaining why President Obama would want to disqualify Clinton: To destroy America!

“I’ve got a theory about why President Obama is trying to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy,” Fischer said. “If his agenda is to weaken this country; if his agenda is to transform this country into something that you and I don’t recognize, I believe he thinks he can do that better if Hillary Clinton loses than if Hillary Clinton wins. I think this is all about President Obama wanting to preserve his ability to continue to be a community agitator.”

It’s slightly surprising to hear Fischer — who believes that the president was too lazy to even find out about the Osama bin Laden raid — suggest that Obama will continue the hard work of dismantling the Republic after he leaves office. But in any case, he makes a pretty good case for why Republicans should vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

3. Peter Kinder

Screenshot via Buzzfeed

Screenshot: BuzzFeed

The recent Justice Department report on the Ferguson criminal justice system has exposed the crooked practices and deep-seated racism of a rotten institution. Not the Ferguson police department and courts! No, you see, as Missouri lieutenant governor Peter Kinder explains, the Department of Justice has in fact revealed its own racism!

Per Kinder: “There is more racism in the Justice Department […] than anywhere I see in the St. Louis area. […] It is the left. It is the Eric Holder and Obama left, and their minions who are obsessed with race, while the rest of us are moving on beyond it.”

Now, despite the fact that the investigation revealed that for years, Ferguson officials abused their authority by turning the city’s black citizens into a revenue stream through a system of meritless citations, it appears that the actual injustice has been perpetrated on the good state of Missouri by the DoJ’s cadre of “radical, hard left radical leftist lawyers” (try saying that 10 times fast).

Bottom line: Leave Missouri alone, you racist radicals! They have the situation in hand.

You can view the video via BuzzFeed here.

2. Kevin Swanson

Kevin Swanson, the severely warped radio host, has slinked back on to the list! Swanson, you may recall, is the host of Generationsa Colorado Springs-based program whose goal is to “present life from the perspective of a Biblical worldview.” A worldview that apparently causes one to hear a hellish, corrupting influence in the anodyne lyrics of pop idols like Taylor Swift.

Swift’s single “Welcome to New York,” an ode to the city where, as the singer tells it, “you can want who you want / Boys and boys and girls and girls,” is an anthem of depravity, inducing us into national apostasy through our children’s precious, impressionable ears. Mothers, lock up your daughters’ iPods. Better yet, just lock up your daughters. Because to hear Swanson tell it, nowhere — not churches, not public school classrooms — is safe from the corrupting influence of pop culture and its “demon songs.”

Although when you listen to Swanson recite Swift’s lyrics, with a kind of slippery staccato rhythm and creepy sibilant hiss, not to mention the ghoulish, prurient way he elongates these pop singers’ names (“Miiiley Cyruuuus, Taaaaylor Swift taking their little fan club allllll the waaaay, allll the waaaay…”), um, yeah it kind of does sound demonic.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/196336896″ params=”color=ff5500″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

(Incidentally, the godless city that is the subject of the song was not fond of the tune either. Swift’s really getting it from all sides here.)

1. Rick Santorum & Friends
At far-right campaign events, there’s often a crazy person in a crowd who creates an awkward moment for the politicians in attendance. But few have ever delivered like the InfoWars-style paranoiac who took over last week’s South Carolina National Security Action Summit.

During the event, this week’s “winner,” former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, took a question from the audience — and it was a real doozy.

“Why is the Congress rolling over and letting this communist dictator destroy my country?” a woman shouted at Santorum. “Y’all know what he is and I know what he is. I want him out of the White House! He’s not a citizen. He could’ve been removed a long time ago.”

After name dropping This Week In Crazy favorite Larry Klayman, the woman got to her main point — and her rant completely skipped the rails.

“Where do we go from here? Ted [Cruz] told me I’ve got to wait now ’til the next election. I don’t think the country will be around for the next election,” she lamented. “Obama tried to blow up a nuke in Charleston a few months ago…he has fired all the generals and all the admirals who said they wouldn’t fire on the American people if you asked them to do so if he wanted to take the guns away from them!”

Santorum, who looked deeply uncomfortable throughout the entire diatribe, finally got an opportunity to answer.

“First off, I take somewhat offense,” Santorum began. Well, that sounds promising!

“Because I’m not a sitting member of the Senate, so I’m not taking blame for any of that stuff.” Oh.

Good luck with that plan to avoid another circus primary in 2016.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

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