Rush Limbaugh on Hurricane Irma

The Washington Post details's Rush Limbaugh's Tuesday reaction to Hurricane Irma:

Rush Limbaugh didn't say the magic words, but on Tuesday he basically accused the media of creating fake news about Hurricane Irma, which is threatening Florida after hitting Barbuda and Antigua. The storm's 185-mile-per-hour winds tied the record high for any Atlantic hurricane making landfall.

“These storms, once they actually hit, are never as strong as they're reported,” Limbaugh claimed on his syndicated radio show. He added that “the graphics have been created to make it look like the ocean's having an exorcism, just getting rid of the devil here in the form of this hurricane, this bright red stuff.”

Think Progress elaborates:

“So there is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it. You can accomplish a lot just by creating fear and panic. You don’t need a hurricane to hit anywhere,” Limbaugh said on his show Tuesday. “All you need is to create the fear and panic accompanied by talk that climate change is causing hurricanes to become more frequent and bigger and more dangerous, and you create the panic, and it’s mission accomplished, agenda advanced.”

Today's Think Progress headline ties all of this together:

Limbaugh evacuates South Florida after claiming Hurricane Irma was a liberal hoax

An additional perspective from the far-right

The Right Wing Watch site, funded by People for the American Way, is a good place to keep tabs on what some of these folks are doing and saying. My current favorite is a story about Liz Crokin who is a political commentator and columnist for Town Hall:

Crokin encouraged viewers to “look very closely at the people who are screaming the loudest, complaining about President Trump” because “every single one of those people, you’ll find—because I’ve researched all these scumbags—you will find that all of these people have ties to sex trafficking rings, ties to pedophilia, ties to pedophiles.”

The Intelligencer carries Town Hall columnists although, to their credit, I don't recall seeing any by Liz Crokin.

While it is fun to chuckle at some of these conspiracies, it ought to be remembered that supporting and publicizing outlandish conspiracy theories does not disqualify someone from becoming President of the United States.

For an excellent analysis of how both the right and left embrace conspiracy theories, I highly recommend "How America Lost Its Mind" in the September 2017 issue of The Atlantic.