This is a long segment but worth watching from beginning to end. After I saw the tweet from Matt Drudge declaring 2013 to be "the year of Alex Jones," I couldn't figure out what benefit could come to the right from adopting the bizarre lunacy Jones spews on a daily basis.

Maddow gets to the bottom of it. This is all about Islamophobia, the right-wing fear machine, and how they plan to capitalize on the Boston bombings in order to feed every stupid conspiracy theory on the planet. If you thought they lost their minds during health care reform, you haven't seen anything yet.

I've noticed a ramp-up of outrageous statements over the past several weeks, too. RightWingWatch's front page usually has a lot of religious righties spewing gay hate. They still do have a lot of that, but I've seen more and more front-page real estate there dedicated to the Islamophobes and nativists.

There is the dominionist preacher John Hagee lumping 'liberals and Islamists' together in his declaration that both groups hate America, ex-FBI agent and current Breitbart columnist John Guandolo squawking about stopping Obama and al-Qaeda from taking over the government, and of course, Glenn Beck.

Those aren't necessarily mainstream, though. Checking in over at Media Matters, I see Chris Wallace calling for the police to 'infiltrate' the Muslim community, Fox News' Eric Bolling's shameful smear of Keith Ellison as the "Muslim apologist in Congress," Rush Limbaugh claiming that liberals influenced the Boston bombers, and Matt Drudge pushing the idea that food stamps and welfare lead to terrorism.

All of those stories were on the front page of each site. It's a meme, folks. Every right wing personality is jumping on the bandwagon. Bryan Fischer got in on the act today, too. Where did it all begin, though?

Before the Boston Marathon, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' spouse Ginni (Virginia) Thomas spent an entire week on the Daily Caller flogging her own version of "liberals and Muslims hate America." It appears that she began to bang the drum for Islamophobia in order to try and kill any real efforts on immigration reform. Thomas has also been on the cutting edge of the invented Benghazi scandal that isn't, flogging that for everything it's worth. It seems unseemly for the spouse of a Supreme Court Justice to be out there spewing hate and white power, but she does it daily.

Over at Breitbart News, they don't even try to hide it. Not content to attack the left, they're going after Marco Rubio and anyone else in the Republican party who would dare to continue the push for immigration reform, post-Boston. Because...Muslims. And conspiracies.

In 2010, John Amato and Dave Neiwert's book Over the Cliff described how the right lost their minds after Obama was elected. I thought then it was about as bad as it could get, but I was wrong. Having moved as far over the right as they can possibly squeeze, they're now reaching for Alex Jones' bizarro and paranoid conspiracy theories to keep the fear marching on.

Perhaps we should reconsider the fluoride in the water. Maybe replace it with Xanax?