#1098: Erik Rush

A.k.a. The other Rush

Erik Rush is an extreme-right pundit, conspiracy theorist and contributor to Fox News, WND and Canada Free Press, as well as a pretty much essential entry in any Encyclopedia of loons – wingnuttery doesn’t come more wingnut than Erik Rush. It isn’t very hard to predict Rush’s opinions on a range of issues, but in 2012 Rush seems to have started a campaign to consecutively outcrazy himself in every column he wrote, which has led to some mildly interesting and novel results (this one is pretty good).

Obama, communism and tyranny

Of course, in Rush’s mind Obama is a Marxist extremist (he never explains in what respect) and totalitarian (ditto), who ascended to power through voter fraud (he offers no evidence). The founding fathers would have hanged him and most of today’s politicians (also here and here), and Harry Reid “deserves” to be dragged behind a truck. Apparently the occasion for the latter outburst was the 2013 fiscal cliff negotiations and the possibility of new gun laws, which Rush warned are both part of a global plot by Marxists, corporations and bankers (duh) to destroy America. It doesn’t even seem to be for personal gain (but his communism is enough to warrant Obama’s imprisonment for Rush, out of respect for the Constitution’s explicitly anti-marxist message). Indeed, it seems that Rush assumes that Obama’s goal is to copy “Mao, Lenin , Stalin and Castro – men who murdered hundreds of millions in their ascent to total dominion over their respective nations,” to establish his dictatorship just because it is evil (Rush has, after all, wondered whether Obama is a member of a Satanic cult together with Jay-Z and Beyoncé – he has the information “on very good authority”, and Obama is a lot like Damien, the demonic kid from The Omen, though Rush doesn’t go into details). Obama’s communist plot is apparently so evil and destructive that “most of the ‘New World Order’ scenarios do not hold water in light of this,” but only Rush knows the truth! Just look at how Obama orchestrated the Benghazi attacks for … well, the purpose is a bit nebulous, but it could be for the pure heck of it (Obama later supported Boko Haram BECAUSE BENGHAZI). Or how “narcissistic sociopath” Obama used government shutdown to “usurp complete power”. And in fact, it isn’t only about ruining America. Obama is also part of a communist government-media-law school conspiracy tobring about the End Times.

Who is responsible for these sordid states of affairs? At least Rush has gone so far as to claim that liberal journalists should be tried for treason since liberal journalists “largely facilitated the ascension of Barack Obama”, thereby helping to violate the Constitution (of course, the fact that supporting violations of the Constitution is precisely what he himself suggests in that very column doesn’t quite register – these accusations apply to the others, those Rush disagrees with, not himself). To complement the call, Rush also warned, after Obama’s reelection, that the Obama administration will try to prosecute conservatives and that Obama “might be on drugs”, and called on journalists, who should be in jail, to stop him. Such prosecution (already happening, apparently – some people criticize Rush, which means that they are violating his freedom of speech) will be preceded by Obama intentionally sinking the economy to create “civil unrest,” which will then give him “the chance to shore up and perhaps even test his nascent totalitarian infrastructure” and implement “martial law or something like it”. One surmises that it is also his love for the Constitution and the democratic process that motivates his call for Americans to “go to any length” to facilitate a violent removal of Obama and his allies through violent revolution (also here). He particularly called on the Military to help, in part because he interprets Obama’s political positions as constituting treason by nature.

It wasn’t only the press that helped Obama get elected, though. He was elected partially because America suffers (it’s apparently America’s central problem) from an excess of “negrophilia” (there are, for instance, too many blacks on television – Rush has also argued that the white man colonized Africa because the people there “gave the impression” that they were “only a few steps out of the trees” and wondered whether South Africa was better off under apartheid). Also, liberals are pushing a “culture of death” and “deviance” in order to destroy America, and he has written extensively about the ostensible causal mechanisms – apparently the left’s alleged depravity “has its roots in true supernatural evil,” as the leaders on the left are “influenced by malevolent forces.” He also warns that mind control is at work and leading to mass killings: “While I haven’t discounted the possibility of mind-control protocols having been employed on certain individuals lately, I believe it is altogether possible that some of the seemingly random violence we are witnessing may have its genesis in the influence to which I refer.”

Then there is the lamentable ignorance of the American population. It is worth quoting Rush at length: “For example, it does not take any advanced training in economics to make the determination that the Obama administration is as fiscally irresponsible as it could possibly be. This is not a wild accusation; the 1974 Budget Act requires Congress to pass a budget each year. Considering just this one instance, it ought to be fairly easy for the informed American of reasonable intellect to infer that there is something dreadfully amiss with a government that has not passed a budget in four years, yet has increased the national debt by trillions of dollars and allows its president to authorize billions in additional spending on an almost weekly basis … If this hypothetical informed American of reasonable intellect were to take advantage of the unbiased raw data available, he would quickly come to the conclusion that my charge of unprecedented fiscal irresponsibility is indeed accurate.” Of course, some of these ignorant Americans may also – unlike Rush – be aware that budgets are passed by Congress, not the executive branch. The rest of the accusations of ignorance are even more ignorant.

Gays, Marxism and totalitarianism

And then there is, of course, the gay agenda. Gay rights advocates have a “venomous hatred for everything smacking of Christianity,” and same-sex marriage is part of “the anti-theistic, Christophobic design of the radical left,” which Rush claims will bring about “societal dissolution” and put the U.S. on “the road to tyranny.” The causal mechanism is again a bit woolly, but as Rush learned from Glenn Beck it has something to do with Common Core, and probably Satan – at least by allowing gays (“freaks”) on stage during the 2014 Grammys, Norman Lear opened the doors to Satanism.

And, particularly insidiously, the people behind the gay agenda are deliberately pushing bigots to to get violent against them. It’s all a plot, and any hatred and violence against gays is all their fault.

Gun control, communism and totalitarianism

Among the measures Obama is taking to implement totalitarianism (and the End Times) is, of course, gun control. Rush claims that the left is to blame for urban crime (“It is the destructive social policies of the left that have precipitated the dysfunction that leads to violence in the black community … Societal dysfunction fostered by the left has led to increasing levels of violence, some of which is perpetrated with firearms”), and concludes that “radical Marxists” in the Obama administration hope to “foster” gun violence to justify their plan to “disarm Americans,” which will allow them to “manifest their decades-long dream of a Marxist America.” He also suspects that President Obama may be behind the recent murder of gun enthusiast Keith Ratliff as just “the first of many such executions that will take place in order to silence individuals whom the government deems a threat to their oligarchical collectivist agenda.” He admits, though, that he has “no proof” besides his own “inclination.” But hey – this is Erik Rush, and he hasn’t ever used any evidence besides his inclination ever in any case. Christians, on the other hand, will be classified as “mentally ill” and shipped off “to an asylum”. Liberals are also to blame for the Trayvon Martin murder – Martin was murdered because liberals turned him into a “thug-in-training” who “accosted” George Zimmerman.

Obama, China, tyranny and communism and totalitarianism and tyranny and Satan

What else can Obama be using? Currently Obama is purging the military leadership in order to make it easier for him to murder U.S. citizens as part of a communist autocoup (in that very column Rush also complains that no one is taking him seriously). As a good communist, Obama is of course also looking to China. Indeed, Obama is actually about to cancel the 2014 elections and hand the US over to China, starting with giving American land to the Chinese government in exchange for debt forgiveness (Rush hasn’t quite understood that debt part), as part of his push for “disarming the American populace” to please his Chinese overlords. Rush claims to have this information from “sources”, but it sounds suspiciously like the plot of the Albert Brooks book 2030. According to Rush there is also a “50% chance” that Obama will cancel the 2016 elections and become a dictator, which would, one assumes, come in addition to already having cancelled the 2014 elections and given the country over to China. He gives no indication of how he calculated the probabilities.

At some point Obama will even allow terrorist attacks to justify martial law (also here). Indeed, he may already have done so. Sandy Hook was an obvious case of a false flag operation, as was the 2013 Navy Yard attacks. Rush pointed out for instance how young women photographed crying at the scenes of the Aurora and Sandy Hook shootings and the Boston Marathon Bombing look similar, and therefore must be the same woman and an actress paid by President Obama. And Obama is to blame also for the former KKK leader who went on a shooting spree at two Jewish centers in Overland Park, Kansas, in 2013.

Oh, yes – then there is the Boston bombing, though in this case Rush chose instead to respond by calling for all Muslims to be killed (and no, he wasn’t joking or exaggerating – “they’re evil”. Indeed). Later on Rush complained that he was being criticized for bigotry merely for using the word “Muslim” – what else in what he said could have been the target of criticism? And the fact that no Muslim had declared his support for him shows that they are, indeed, as evil and anti-American as he claimed. It has also been important to Rush to emphasize that the Tsarnaev brothers, who are literally caucasian (that is, from the Caucasus), aren’t really white, since anything else would complicate his assumption that only brown people commit terrorist acts.

Finally, Obama is using immigration as a tool for total domination. Thanks to liberals, “émigrés from Third World toilets” have been flooding America so that we currently “have far more human garbage in this country than we ever ought to have tolerated.” But there is an agenda behind this apparent chaos – according to Rush muslim immigrants will be “Obama’s cutthroat foot soldiers” and “incite the chaos that will necessitate martial law.”

Helpfully, Rush sums up pretty much his whole authorship in this column, where he hysterically and incoherently points out that Obama is murdering everyone, and claiming that he doesn’t need evidence to prove it. Obama killed his gay lovers and drowned a woman who may have “come by information on the night of the [Aurora] shooting that wound up being detrimental to her health.” He also killed journalist Michael Hastings, an identity theft criminal, his dog trainer, Ambassador Christopher Stevens and (rather obviously) Andrew Breitbart. He is furthermore “creating jihadi cells” across America to help him with the killings. Now, despite quite clearly asserting these things Rush insists that he is just asking questions – this is, after all, the age of FEMA camps, which Obama will for instance make use of to stow away Cliven Bundy when carries out his plot to seize control of the food supply, so you don't want to assert too much. He did explicitly assert, though, that Obama “murdered” everyone on the missing Malaysia airlines plane; he knows this based on information from an unnamed source who is rather obviously Jim Garrow.

Moreover, Rush has promoted Garrow’s idea that Obama is trying to nuke South Carolina and indeed the whole of the US as part of the UN Agenda 21, using the 2013 Iran agreement as a diversion because Americans were catching on to their plans. Therefore Obama should be executed. And people who criticize Rush should be thrown in jail while government officials hang “from D.C. like fruits”, and the end times are here and Jesus returns.

For absolute insanity, you can see Rush discuss Obama’s imminent civil war with Rick Wiles here. You can see Wiles and Rush play wingnut bingo here, and a breathtaking exchange with Jim Garrow here. There is also a fine Erik Rush resource here.

Diagnosis: A combination of Alex Jones and Ann Coulter without the attention span or intellectual powers of either, Rush has managed to establish himself as more or less the epitome of fundie hysterical anger and flailing campaigns against coherence and reason. His impact is probably rather limited, though – it is hard to imagine that people listen to him without first having been irrevocably lost to reason anyways.