This Week In Crazy: Meet The Hillary Shoe Truthers, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right
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. Bryan Fischer
And Jesus said to His disciples, “Truly I say to you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.†“Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.â€Â —Matthew 19
As a self-styled leader of the religious right, American Family Association mouthpiece Bryan Fischer is certainly familiar with that passage from the Bible. But during the Tuesday’s tax-day edition of his radio show, Fischer proposed an addendum: What if the rich man enters with a ticker-tape parade?
//www.youtube.com/embed/od1abwBWk3s
“The top 1 percent are funding 30 percent of the government!†Fischer raged. “So, rather than the poor, the low income and the middle class being resentful of these people, they should be kissing the ground on which they walk!â€
“Who’s paying for the EBT cards? Who’s paying for food stamps? Who’s paying for the women and infant children program? Who’s paying for subsidized housing? Who’s paying for Medicaid? It is the top 1 percent,†he added. “So, they ought to be given ticker-tape parades once a week in all of our major cities to thank them for funding welfare for everybody.â€
If Ken Langone ever abandons Chris Christie, maybe he should try to draft Fischer into the 2016 presidential race. After all, they share an obsession with the 1 percent — and the Nazis.
4. Phyllis Schlafly
Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr
After their high-profile struggle to reconcile Equal Pay Day with opposing the Paycheck Fairness Act, Republicans began redoubling their efforts to sell women on the GOP.
And as usual when Republicans are trying to attract new voters, Phyllis Schlafly is here to screw things up.
In a Tuesday op-ed for the Christian Post, Schlafly took it upon herself to lay out the anti-feminist case for the gender pay gap. In short: Women should be happy to make less money, because it will help them find a husband.
While women prefer to HAVE a higher-earning partner, men generally prefer to BE the higher-earning partner in a relationship. This simple but profound difference between the sexes has powerful consequences for the so-called pay gap.
Suppose the pay gap between men and women were magically eliminated. If that happened, simple arithmetic suggests that half of women would be unable to find what they regard as a suitable mate.
Obviously, I’m not saying women won’t date or marry a lower-earning men, only that they probably prefer not to. If a higher-earning man is not available, many women are more likely not to marry at all.
Schlafly later added that “The best way to improve economic prospects for women is to improve job prospects for the men in their lives, even if that means increasing the so-called pay gap.â€
Meanwhile, somewhere in Washington D.C., Reince Priebus is presumably sobbing into a copy of his “Growth and Opportunity Project.“
3. “Blood Moon†Watchers
 Photo via Wikimedia Commons
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To say that Tuesday’s lunar eclipse upset some members of the far right would be a dramatic understatement.
Many people refer to the eclipse as a “blood moon,†because sunlight filtering through the Earth’s atmosphere gives the moon a red hue during the event. Pastor John Hagee’s reasoning is a bit different, however; he thinks that the blood moon represents the beginning of the End Times.
“I believe that the heavens are God’s billboard, that he has been sending signals to planet Earth, and we just haven’t been picking them up.†Hagee says. “God is literally screaming at the world, ‘I’m coming soon.’â€
Hagee has dabbled in apocalyptic rhetoric before; he once claimed that God sent Hurricane Katrina to New Orleans because the city was planning a sinful “homosexual rally.â€As for the latest sign of a vengeful God, you can conveniently learn more about the coming apocalypse by buying Hagee’s book!
While Pastor Hagee believes that the blood moon signals the end of days, Pastor Mark Blitz has an even crazier theory: The eclipse is just God giving the finger to Barack Obama.
Writing in WorldNetDaily (of course), Blitz explains:
Barack Obama quite recently, expressing his frustration that Republican members of Congress won’t give him what he wants, threatened arbitrary executive action, promising that he has a “pen and phone.â€
But there are “flashing red warning lights†in the heavens that should command peoples’ attention right now, because the one behind those warnings, God, had “more than a pen and a phone in his hand,†according to the author of “Blood Moons: Decoding the Imminent Heavenly Signs.â€
…
“I believe the moons are like flashing red warning lights at a heavenly intersection saying to Israel as well as the nations they will be crossing heavenly red lines and if they do, they will understand as Pharaoh did on Passover night 3,500 years ago that the Creator backs up what He says.“Like Pharaoh the leaders and pundits of today will realize when it comes to crossing the red lines of the Creator of the universe he has more than a pen and a phone in his hand.â€
Look on the bright side: At least the religious right is (kind of) talking about science!
2. Ted Yoho
 
Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr
U.S. Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) earned plenty of attention this week for telling a black voter that the Civil Rights Act may be unconstitutional, but that may not have even been his craziest statement of the day.
After the controversial town hall meeting on Monday, ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes interviewed Yoho about climate change:
KEYES: Droughts and extreme weather have been on the rise here in Florida. Do you think that’s something that’s attributable to manmade climate change?
YOHO: No. I think it’s a natural occurrence. I think we need to be good stewards of the resources we have and we need to get better, which we have, through technology and innovation.
KEYES: Do you think scientists are right on climate change or are they off-base on it?
YOHO: I think there’s an agenda-driven science. I can read stuff that says that the information was skewed. It’s not right. I’m a guy that’s worked out in the weather since I was 16. I can tell there’s climate change. The cause? I’m not smart enough for that.
So Floridians can go ahead and forget about the extreme dangers that climate change poses to their state. Ted Yoho may not be smart enough to know why he’s been getting sweatier while he works out in the weather, but he’s certain that he knows more than 97 percent of climate scientists.
And after all, unskewing numbers never goes wrong for Republicans.
1. Shoe Truthers
 Image by Mike Licht via Flickr
 When a woman threw her shoe at former secretary of state Hillary Clinton during a speech last week, regular This Week In Crazy readers knew what would happen next: The Shoe Truthers are here.
First, there was Arthur Louis. Writing on the website of Fox News contributor Bernard Goldberg, Louis began by parroting Brian Kilmeade’s assertion that George W. Bush is a much better shoe-dodger than Clinton, who “ducks flying shoes like a girl.†He then gets to the meat of his point:
“There is a political axiom, I believe first posed by Euclid or Archimedes, that when Hillary does something, or when something happens to her, she has carefully calculated it beforehand,†he writes. “So it would not be stretching logic to suppose that Hillary arranged to have the shoe thrown at her. Remembering the Bush incident, she may have calculated that this would make her seem presidential.â€
The stupidity didn’t stop there. Disgraced former presidential candidate and pizza magnate Herman Cain weighed in via Twitter:
Hmm…Fakery from the Clintons? RT @BestofCain: VIDEO: That Hillary shoe-throwing thing does look kind of fake, huh? http://t.co/7JF6JllqJG
— Herman Cain (@THEHermanCain) April 15, 2014
And when there’s a stupid conspiracy theory about the Clintons, Rush Limbaugh is always on the case.
“I just do not attach much genuineness to them at all and I don’t know why anybody would be throwing a shoe at Hillary,†Limbaugh said. “Unless, maybe it’s an attempt to make the Benghazi people look like nuts and lunatics and wackos.â€
http://mediamatters.org/embed/198882
That’s right: Hillary Clinton arranged to have a shoe thrown at her head to distract America from #Benghazi.
We have a long way to go until 2016.
Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!
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Image, top: Red shoe by Mike Licht via Flickr
A version of this article originally appeared in The National Memo and is republished here by permission.
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Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner is under fire after releasing a video declaring that new allegations against him are false, yet he is “taking time to reflect” on a path forward.
Politico on Monday afternoon reported that a woman who dated Platner, Jenny Racicot, “says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.”
“Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner,” Politico reported, “for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.”
In a video posted to social media eleven minutes after the Politico story dropped, Platner says, “I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me. Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false.”
He said he and his supporters “were united in a love of Maine, a belief that our politics must change, in a focus on defeating Susan Collins.”
“So, regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful the political reality will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love, the people that I love, the movement I belong to, and the goal of defeating Susan Collins.”
“Those were the goals when we launched this campaign. And they remain my goals today.”
“Throughout it all, you never turned your back on me. And I will not turn my back on you now. Every one of you deserves to see that vision come to fruition and see Susan Collins defeated. And we will use every tool at our disposal to do so.”
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a political commentator who served as the communications director for the Jeb Bush 2016 presidential campaign, blasted Platner.
“I’m sorry but ‘we are taking time to reflect on the best path forward’ is not an option on the table,” Miller wrote. “Either it’s false and you campaign with vigor or it’s true and you get out / apologize to everyone you let down.”
Journalist Ryan Grim, commenting on Platner’s video, noted that Platner “strongly suggests he is considering dropping out. Already Troy Jackson and Chellie Pingree, both gubernatorial candidates, are being kicked around in Maine circles as potential replacements.”
Several others, including Puck News’ Peter Hamby, predicted Platner will be dropping out.
Platner had postponed several campaign events before the Politico story was published.
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 6, 2026
President Donald Trump is facing backlash after posting a video of children — including showing their unblurred faces — graduating from kindergarten, with some of the girls purportedly wearing hijabs.
“President Trump posted a captionless video of graduating kindergarteners on Truth Social on Monday, goading his supporters into verbally attacking little children simply for being Muslim,” The New Republic reported. “The clip is from Gateway STEM Academy, a majority-Black K-8 public charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota. It shows about 21 children in caps and gowns on stage singing a song together. Most of the girls are wearing hijabs.”
The original post of the video which Trump reposted reads: “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab … in kindergarten.”
Trump did not add any comments. TNR called the post “Islamophobic, weird, and creepy,” while noting that the comments section of Trump’s post was filled with calls “by racist, xenophobic MAGA supporters” to “deport the children and ban hijabs.”
TNR also noted that it “should come as no surprise that Trump isn’t above attacking children who just learned how to read, but this post is still particularly discomforting—and will certainly contribute to the already potent level of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and in Minnesota.”
Critics blasted Trump.
“There is something deeply unsettling about the president of the United States—the most powerful person in the world—going after kindergarten schoolchildren in Minnesota because they wore hijabs, as Trump has done this morning on his website,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote.
One social media commentator wrote, “Trump posted an unblurred video of more than a dozen Muslim kindergartners to Truth Social, exposing the children’s faces while targeting them for their religion.”
Another added, “Trump is a bigot. The president took to Truth Social to attack kindergarteners in hijabs. These are little kids. The president isn’t just a bigot, he’s also a coward.”
The original video was posted to the X social media platform in June.
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) at the time commented, “If you are in a public school in America, you should be speaking english.”
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to delay releasing the $5.8 million civil judgment to E. Jean Carroll are being met with a warning by the journalist’s legal team, who suggest there could be a legal maneuver for Trump to employ to forgo paying the judgment in either of the two cases he lost.
According to The Guardian, on July 4, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered Trump to release the $5.8 million judgment, which is in escrow, to Carroll by this coming Tuesday — or explain why he would not do so.
Carroll’s attorneys think Trump may be trying to buy time to mount another legal strategy, telling the judge that Trump’s request for an extension “appears to be little more than yet another play for time.”
“The case is separate from Trump’s appeal of a Manhattan civil jury’s 2024 award of $83.3m to Carroll for defamation,” The Guardian explains. “But her lawyers have suggested a legal scenario in which the president might seek to conjoin the cases and further delay payment of both.”
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) wrote, “We can only assume that defendant is seeking … to buy time so he can try to concoct some new basis to put off paying plaintiff presumably in connection with his forthcoming petition and motion for a rehearing.”
Trump’s former attorney, Justin Smith, in one of his final acts, wrote to the Supreme Court suggesting that his client would be appealing the $83.3 million civil judgment.
Smith argued that the Supreme Court “may wish to consider the petitions together,” given they involve the same parties.
The larger judgment case involves possible questions of presidential immunity, and that has Carroll’s attorneys concerned.
“A conjoined case, Carroll’s lawyers fear, could result in both judgments being wiped out,” The Guardian reports.
The president has also made clear he is no fan of Judge Kaplan, after the jurist made several rulings that “angered” Trump.
“What else can you expect from a Trump Hating, Clinton appointed judge, who went out of his way to make sure that the result was as negative as it could possible be,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2023, “speaking to, and in control of, a jury from an anti-Trump area which is probably the worst place in the US for me to get a fair ‘trial’.”
Image via Reuters
Platner Scorched Over ‘Taking Time’ Video After New Accusation
Trump Sparks Fury Online After Posting Unblurred Video of Muslim Kindergartners in Hijabs
One Legal Maneuver Threatens to Undo Everything E. Jean Carroll Won
Inside the Group Helping MAGA Voters Walk Away — And What Finally Pushed Them
