At a day-long conference in Austin organized by anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Texe Marrs, a series of speakers revealed who really killed JFK, explained the evils of Obamacare and ranted about the “New World Order,” but steered clear of spewing overt hatred against Jews. Sponsored by Power of Prophecy, Marrs’ Austin-based “end-times ministry,” the Liberty & Truth Conference hosted about 80 people at the Airport Hilton on Saturday. The audience was overwhelmingly white and over 40. Many of the attendees were from out of state. ( continue to full post… )

Editor’s Note: We’ve corrected the attribution of a quote below suggesting that if the attackers were antigovernment they would have attacked a government target, rather than random Americans. The quote actually came from Mike Lackomar of the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia. Hatewatch regrets the error, which was the result of an editing mistake.

Who was responsible for the deadly Boston terrorist attack?

The Muslims did it. No, it was an illegal immigrant. Think again – it was a gay guy. Wait, you missed the key signs: Our own government once again pulled off an act of covert terror to promote its nefarious aims.

Fingers have been pointed in all of these directions by conspiracy theory peddlers and professional hatemongers since the bombings Monday.

“It’s a pretty safe bet right now that this attack was carried out by an Islamist,” declared a post on the Tea Party Nation website Tuesday. The obvious cause for the violence? “We have a government that is not committed to protecting America.” Linking Islam with Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” of Communism, the post warned that the Boston bombings are just another event presaging future violence in “an ideological war” that can only be won if we have tougher, more anti-Islam U.S. political leaders. That, of course, would be the Tea Party cabal.

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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — You might have thought that a conference with the title “Conservative Call to Action” would feature lots of talk of small government, of Ronald Reagan, of the need to defend traditional values and a capitalist economy. But that would be yesterday’s conservatives.

Instead, at the event held Saturday in this famously conservative town that is home to the nation’s biggest concentration of Christian Right organizations, rabid Florida pastor Terry Jones, whose televised burning of Korans set off riots overseas that left several people dead, claimed that he didn’t hate Muslims at all — and then went on to rant that Islam “makes Nazism, fascism look like charity.” He was joined by other “conservatives” who warned that the universities are brimming with “commies,” that all liberals are evil, that President Obama only won re-election through “massive voter fraud,” and that the president’s health care plan is “Marxism to the core.”

Symptomatic of the shift of a broad swath of the conservative movement to outright paranoid fantasy was the appearance of Dinesh D’Souza, who was once a respected commentator on the right. D’Souza began to run off the rails with a 2010 Forbes magazine article that he expanded into a book and then into a 2012 film, “2016: Obama’s America.” The article was pilloried by more old-fashioned conservatives, including Daniel Larison, who described it in The American Conservative as “the most ridiculous piece of Obama analysis yet written.” The article, book and film argue that Obama is motivated by a dream of undermining Western power. ( continue to full post… )

America’s favorite far-right entertainer, Glenn Beck, has always got the scoop on the coming End of the World and how to protect yourself from it. When he’s not urging fans to buy guns and gold, he’s telling them to build bunkers and stock up on food.

Now, just in time for the holidays, the fear-mongering eschatologist is shilling for a new prophecy of doom – one that comes wrapped in a neat dust jacket, ready to stuff in your loved one’s stocking. ( continue to full post… )

Even before the winds of Hurricane Sandy began to moderate, conspiracy theorists of a variety of bents got busy explaining the real meaning of the storm. Because, of course, a monster storm can’t just come from something like “weather” or “climate.” No, a storm like that just must be the product of nefarious or, perhaps, spiritual forces too big for most of us to understand. And so, while millions of Americans deal with the aftermath of what has become the largest Atlantic tropical storm in recorded history, lots more are busy explaining what’s behind all that wind.

Here, gathered over the last few days, is a sampling of their views. ( continue to full post… )

Hurricane Isaac has inconvenienced a lot of people.

Many thousands of Gulf Coast residents have boarded up windows and sought shelter inland. And many others are now facing the prospect of cleaning up and rebuilding flooded homes and businesses.

But the inconvenienced people we’ve been hearing about most are the pundits and politicians who gathered in Tampa this week for the Republican National Convention. ( continue to full post… )

Kurt Nimmo says that there is no problem with violent white supremacists in the military.

His boss, Alex Jones, says that there is no problem with gun violence in America – at least, no problem that’s not a result of government-sponsored “mind-control” experiments.

Jones and Nimmo, who are among the biggest spinners of conspiracy theories in the United States, are revered within the antigovernment “Patriot” movement, which is always eager to ascribe malevolent plots to the government. Their fantastical allegations appeared recently on Infowars and PrisonPlanet, Jones-run websites that warn obsessively of a supposed government conspiracy to surrender national sovereignty to the forces of a fascistic “New World Order.” ( continue to full post… )

With last weekend’s mass killing at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin fresh in the public’s memory, the usual players on the conspiracy scene have begun crafting wild, alternative narratives of what really happened.

The theory has started to spread that the attack was orchestrated by some dark sector of the federal government in order to justify rolling back gun rights. This idea, of course, has long been used by the antigovernment right to explain acts of domestic terrorism: Oklahoma City, for example, and even the jihadist attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. The Wisconsin version has appeared on dozens of right-wing blogs and appears to be gaining traction.

Infowars, the conspiracist website maintained by Alex Jones, seems to have led the charge. In an article published earlier this week after neo-Nazi Wade Michael Page killed six people in Oak Creek, Wis., writer Kurt Nimmo accused the federal government – and, ludicrously, the Southern Poverty Law Center – of somehow being tied to the shootings. The proof? Only dubious claims pulled from Page’s life story. The alleged skinhead gunman was in a psychological operations unit in the Army during the 1990s. ( continue to full post… )

Nothing spooks antigovernment conspiracy theorists like the United Nations and its international treaties – particularly when it comes to perceived threats to their right to bear arms.

So naturally, far-right paranoiacs really have their panties in a twist over the proposed Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which would establish standards for the international trade of weapons.

Since UN talks about the ATT began on July 2, FrontPage Magazine, Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, WorldNetDaily, and myriad other far-right “news” outlets have issued panicked articles denouncing the treaty as plot to gut the Second Amendment, destroy America, and pave the way for the establishment of a one-world government. ( continue to full post… )

The Tea Party Nation, one of the more extreme factions of the Tea Party movement, has dipped deeper into the conspiratorial waters of antigovernment lore, most recently promoting the Oath Keepers and other antigovernment “Patriots” as the last line of defense for Americans increasingly confronted with “a government verging on evil.”

In a post published over the weekend on the Tea Party Nation’s website, regular blogger Alan Caruba painted a dire picture of the threats to freedom that lie in wait under President Obama, whom he calls a “red diaper baby” and a far-left functionary “raised from birth and mentored to embrace communism.”

“Obama’s disregard for the Constitution, its separation of powers, and Americans suffering greatly from his policies, suggests that he is not beyond making the greatest grab for power using a bogus ‘national emergency’ or manufactured ‘crisis’ to declare martial law,” Caruba wrote. He goes on to cite three recent executive orders as proof positive that Obama is setting up the nation to abandon its constitutional mandates and wage an all-out campaign against freedom. ( continue to full post… )