Have the most extreme elements on the political landscape – once considered beyond the embrace of polite society – taken control of the Republican Party? According to columnist Jean-Sébastian Stehli of France’s Le Figaro, the conspiracy theorists who once shouted themselves hoarse about fluoridated water being a communist mind-control plot and government implantation of chips under citizens’ skin now call the shots in the GOP – and Mitt Romney has joined them in their lunacy.
For Le Figaro, Jean-Sébastian Stehli writes in part:
French screenwriter Michel Audiard, noted for snappy dialogue, once wrote, “An idiot will try anything. That is how you know he is an idiot.” The same can be said of demagogues. Last Sunday on Fox News – where else? – Romney explained that soaring gas prices are actually the result of a plot by the president. Why not also hold Obama responsible for the tsunami in Japan, the financial crisis, the disappearance of whales and global warming? Correction: global warming is a hoax invented by Democrats as a form of mind-control. And why, according to Romney, has Obama devised such a plot? Of course, to undermine the American way of life and the individualism symbolised by the automobile. (Although, doesn’t this make Romney, who wanted Detroit to go bankrupt, the real adversary of the American way of life?).
What’s so alarming about these crazy assertions is that, repeated all day long, they end up becoming reality for millions of Americans. And scarier still: until recently, such statements were the exclusive territory of the country’s most extreme conspiracy theorists, who believed that fluoridated water was a communist plot to control American minds, or that the government had planted chips under the skin of citizens in order to spy on them. Today, the GOP is the conduit for such opinions, and not a single one of its leading figures has strayed from this message.
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