What’s truly scary about the Tea Party is that it borrows so many of its New World Order tropes from Protocols of the Order of Zion-type extremism of the sort that has historically been disseminated from the John Birch Society, the Liberty Lobby, Christian Identity churches, and neo-Nazi outfits like William Luther Pierce’s National Alliance–groups whose rhetoric was virulently racist and unambiguously eliminationist, and whose foundational ideology is based on clinically paranoid premises. No, I’m not calling Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck neo-Nazis–but their playbooks are filled with many of their old tricks. Yes, it’s a ridiculous waste of time to parse Loughner’s politics for clues as to whether he’s a creature of the left or the right. But that doesn’t mean that politics had nothing to do with what happened either. What matters isn’t what’s going on in Loughner’s twisted brain, but what’s out there in plain daylight for anyone with eyes to see–on Fox News, at Tea Party rallies, and, for fairness’s sake, in the occasional nasty pseudonymous post at Daily Kos.
