Human Events, a ridiculously-conservative political magazine, recently reported, “Quietly but systematically, the Bush Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S."

It’s hard to understand exactly what the right is arguing here, but apparently the idea is that the free-trading Bush administration wants to sell out U.S. interests and let Mexicans move products and people through the American Heartland, while bypassing Teamsters on the coasts. Or something. It’s hard to keep up with conservative conspiracy theories.

Yesterday, Christopher Hayes at The Nation tackled the subject, debunked the myths, and connected the bizarre ideas to domestic fears over globalization.

Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation’s Wal-Marts. […]

Grassroots movement exposes elite conspiracy and forces politicians to respond: It would be a heartening story but for one small detail.

There’s no such thing as a proposed NAFTA Superhighway.

Well, sure, if you’re going to let facts get in the way of perfectly good demagoguery, the existence of the highway project might matter.