"
Such Cold War relics as the “communist agenda,” mingled with comparisons to Nazism, are commonplace, and are used to sweep up other alleged government excesses, like COVID restrictions, under a rubric of government oppression. Metaxas
hosted the once-liberal feminist author Naomi Wolf, who apologized to his listeners for having voted for President Joe Biden, whose administration, she said, is “tasking our law enforcement with terrorizing private citizens in a way that is really reminiscent of the Stasi and the Black Shirts.” Metaxas accused the FBI of “terrorizing” people, including the anti-vaccine doctor Simone Gold, who he said is “in jail because she is a doctor who had the temerity to talk about the vaccines as a bad thing.” (In reality, Gold
pled guilty to trespassing at the Capitol on January 6.)
Other hosts, based on nothing more than their own ignorance about the judicial process, have urged their listeners to be suspicious.
Tim Wildmon, president of the
American Family Association, said on his
daily radio show this week, “this is confusing to the average person. By the way, this judge, he was not a federal judge per se. He was a magistrate. I didn’t even know those kinds of judges existed.” (Magistrate judges
routinely issue warrants and preside over a range of other matters.) In the midst of this ramble about not knowing magistrate judges existed, Wildmon dropped an evidence-free statement about Bruce Reinhart, the magistrate judge who issued the Mar-a-Lago search warrant: “He had posted derogatory things about President Trump, his personal views.” Wildmon offered no proof or examples — but he was apparently riffing on a popular right-wing meme that Reinhart had criticized Trump for disparaging statements he made about the late civil rights icon and congressman John Lewis. But his listeners
across the country and on the internet will think that someone who might not even be an actual federal judge and who posted derogatory things about Trump was the one who issued the search warrant."
From TPM "The Chtistian Right"
