At the Daily Kos blog on Wednesday came a rant by the blogger WinSmith against "rampant anti-Semitic paranoia" being central to the conservative movement, as allegedly demonstrated by "know-nothing reactionary racists and clueless buffoons like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin" riling up the ignorant masses:
This rampant anti-Semitic paranoia was that Jews were "redistributing wealth" to take down the true heroic Ayn Rand titans of industry, which were, of course, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Henry Fords, etc.
Henry Ford, himself such a rampant anti-Semite that he published excerpts from The Protocols of Zion in The Dearborn Independent in the 1920s (basically the Koch of his day), believed that Jews were intent on taking down industry through communist redistribution of wealth.
Again, does any of this sound familiar?
This is the same coded meaning structures at work today in the republican party. The only difference? They don't say "Jew." They say "urban elite" or "cultural elite" or "San Francisco values" or "George Soros's moneylending ways".
It's Christian Passion Play writ political, Mel Gibson Passion of the Christ paranoia in which the heroic Jesus Christians of Industry are nailed to their cross by the disbelieving Jewish communist liberals.
Soros.
Alinsky.
Piven.
The names may change, but the framework is exactly the same as it was for Henry Ford.
The Kosmonaut illustrated this thesis with a snippet of The Blues Brothers movie, since top conservatives apparently resemble the Henry Gibson neo-Nazi buffoon in that epic:
Today it could be Muslims, gays, Mexicans or whichever "enemy of the state" the right wing hate machine turns the switch to for this month.
But under it all is the pervasive and rampant anti-Semitism that began the Conservative movement as a reaction to immigration fears of the 1920s and the New Deal of the 1930s, the paranoia about Hollywood of the 1950s, the paranoia about hippies like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman in the 1960s, and the continuing rants about the "War on Christmas" from blowhards on Fox News today.
This anti-Semitic framework is so central to the republican party, it's actually more deeply embedded in the narrative mythos than the more surface racism we see directed at "welfare queens," gay people, Muslims and "Mexican anchor babies."
I would even argue all that racism at other more overt ethnics is just a variation of the central bigotry that has informed the Christian conservative movement for a hundred years now: that Jews are undermining the purity of the Christian Nation from within by spreading left wing communist ideas as a cover for a global financing plan to destroy the world.
(All the emphasis was in the original.)
Earlier, from WinSmith: Daily Kos Yells at Media: Don't You See GOP Wants a "Civil War"? GOP Wants Obama Dead
[Hat tip: Lumberton's Finest]
