Most of us already understand how right wing whacko conspiracies start and grow as the right adds them to the echo chamber and gives them some level of credibility by airing them on talk radio and Fox News. But this segment does a particularly good job of exposing them, using a brand new conspiracy theory as well as more commonly known ones to illustrate the fear gripping the entire right wing.
In the middle of the segment, Sharpton plays a short excerpt from a video from "Lady Patriots" making the claim that the woman who fainted during President Obama's health care event on Monday was faking it, because...why?
Listen, Lady Patriot, this is stupid. You know why it is stupid? Because Prezzy O’Hezzy did not even catch that lady. He just sort of steadied her. If he is going to set someone up to pretend to faint, with a conspiracy of, like, dozens of people, shouldn’t he actually be the hero who catches her? After all, that is how Cory Booker did it, when he pretended to rescue that lady from that fire when she probably did not even exist at all!
I was curious about who Lady Patriots actually is. It is a group blog edited by Sharon Schuetz and Julia Sieben, a law student at the University of Mississippi.
Schuetz works out of Texas, where she runs the Tea Party Community page on Facebook, where all good conspiracy theories go for testing. Click into that page and you'll discover outraged claims that Facebook is silencing conservatives, Marco Rubio bashing, and more. I'm sure Ted Cruz lurks there, and I'm equally certain that Sarah Palin loves it.
Schuetz bills herself as an author and says she holds a PhD in Clinical Christian Counseling. She is a member of the Celebration of Life church in Houston. Evidently she is a counselor by day, and a conspiracy theorist in her spare time.
It's no accident that those who call themselves patriots while making up lies about the president do it because Barack Obama is black, and they're afraid. The real crime is that their fear is picked up by Sarah Palin who relays it to Rush Limbaugh, who relays it to Fox News, and suddenly a crazy, fact-free, made-up claim becomes something your crazy uncle is talking about at Thanksgiving dinner.
Protip for Dr. Schuetz: You'd be better off taking a close look at your own psyche and shedding that fear and anxiety rather than making up stupid conspiracy theories to smear the black guy in the White House.
