#1568: Selwyn Duke

A wingnut’s wingnut (and a particularly crazy one at that), Selwyn Duke writes for the inaccurately named American Thinker and Alan Keyes’s website RenewAmerica. Duke is perhaps particularly known for writing about issues concerning race, and has for instance claimed that Obama is purging the military of white, Christian men in order to make the soldiers loyal to him for the inevitable imposition of martial law. Evidence? It’s what Duke imagines he would have done if he were a commie, which tells you quite a bit about Duke and not very much about Obama or the military. His rant was duly picked up by the Liberty Counsel. Apparently Obama is also trying to instigate a race war by not being white. Here Duke defends the South African apartheid regime (among other things). Here he denounces Michelle Obama’s positive view on desegregation.

Later Duke twisted Neera Tanden’s remark that the president “doesn’t like people” – by which she meant he is a “private person” – to claim that the president is a “misanthrope.” Said Duke: “You know what kinds of leaders didn’t like people?” he mused. “People like Joseph Stalin. People like Ivan the Terrible,” adding: “I’m reminded of Hitler here.” Which is a pretty remarkable display of the workings of a mind unencumbered by reason.

He has also recommended that America should break up like Yugoslavia did since he doesn’t want to live in a country where gay people are treated equally and because liberals are evil heathens. According to Duke the fact that wingnuts are losing the culture wars is “nothing less than a superior culture being subsumed by an inferior one,” and secession is the natural response. Just like 1861. If they do not secede, it will mean “a thousand years of darkness. Oh yes, the end of civilization! And humanity!”

As you’d expect he doesn’t have the faintest clue about how the First Amendment (or the legal system in general) works.

Diagnosis: Yeah, one of those. Zealously idiotic.