#769: Jim Hoft

A.k.a. The dumbest man on the Internet

Jim Hoft is a hardcore wingnut who writes for The Gateway Pundit, a website devoted to conspiracy theories and fallacies driven by rightwing fanaticism. The website is, for instance, pretty much consistent in its global warming denialism and red-baiting, but it also toys with birtherism, mainly by JAQing off. In short, it is something of an online version of WND, without even WND’s ever so feeble attempts at constraints.

And Jim Hoft is your typical contributor. There is little point in trying to explore the full range of his nuttery, but this piece of abysmally mindnumbing idiocy is a pretty good illustration of why Hoft qualifies as an entry in our Encyclopedia. And here Hoft confuses closed captioning on his television screen with a conspiracy (it is epic; do see it). And though I am loath to linking to him, this one probably has to be seen to be believed as well; in this screed Hoft attempts to argue that the Occupy wall street protest was really the result of a conspiracy organized by Soros. His conclusive evidence? Soros had once, back in the days, contributed to a Canadian organization that now played a minor role in organizing protests in Canada. That’s what counts as proof of a conspiracy for people like Hoft when politics is involved.

Indeed, Hoft has won some recognition as the dumbest man on the Internet. Among the entries submitted in the nomination process was his claim that Obama celebrated the murder of Daniel Pearl, the time Hoft fell for a satirical story about a San Diego high school rescinding its commencement invitation to President Obama because students apparently discovered that his long-form birth certificate is a fake, as well as this one, this piece of paranoid survivalist gibberish, his insane attempt to paint Desmond Tutu as an anti-semite through inaccuracy and lying, his outrage that the official logo of the Nuclear Security Summit depticting an atom in his mind “looks like” an Islamic crescent, his attempt to characterize the Westboro Baptist church as a leftwing cult, and his – later often repeated by the crazier elements in wingnut “media” – speculation that Obama was photoshopped into the situation room when Bin Laden was killed.

Diagnosis: I’d assume that even Glenn Beck would be forced to agree that Hoft is a loon. But given the moves of the Overton window it is frankly hard to tell at this point. And Beck has, indeed, repeated some of the bullshit Hoft’s deranged imagination has managed to conjure up.