#2320: Mark Tapson

Mark Tapson is the editor of the “news” website TruthRevolt (remember Badger’s Law), whose mission is “to expose the leftist news media and to hold them accountable for their hypocrisy and bias.” He is also affiliated with the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Tapson is also a hardcore conspiracy theorist, and his research methodology is rather typical of conspiracy theorists. For instance, when Tapson infiltrated the Muslim Student Association’s annual West Coast conference in 2013, he did manage to find what he took to be evidence of a secret Muslim Brotherhood plot to “radicalize” college students: that is, he admitted that he didn’t find anything “radical” or “damning” at the conference, which “was largely very innocuous,” but for Tapson that is all the proof he needs – that the MSA’s conference was so “innocuous” is just part of Muslim Brotherhood strategy to win “the hearts and minds of the young,” and the very act of community-building “radicalizes them and it steers them toward further radicalization down the line.” Or in short: if you find evidence for the hypothesis you have already decided is true: good; if not, you just found evidence that the conspiracy to hide the truth of your hypothesis goes even deeper than you already believed, thus confirming it but in addition making it more urgent.

In addition to the perceived threat of Islamism, Tapson is concerned about communism: anything to the left of Paul Ryan is communist, and can then safely be dismissed by reminding people of the horrors of Stalin’s Soviet Russia and Mao, and thus warrant drawing conclusions like the “Democrat Party is the face of Moloch, the Canaanite god whom Milton called the ‘horrid King besmear’d with blood / Of human sacrifice.’ It is a cult of criminality and death.” And how do these commie crazies ever obtain any power in democratic societies? Voter fraud, of course. Tapson is, of course, also a climate change denialist because in a post-truth world scientific evidence is just whatever suits your ideological commitments anyways.

Diagnosis: A fairly typical wingnut strawman-basher and run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorist, Tapson may be far from the craziest wingnut political commentator out there. That observation, however, says more about the standards among wingnut commentators than it does about Tapson.