Geez, the man's been gone for 6 and a half years and I am still finding him lurking in the background of our diseased political discourse.
Here's how I found the lurking Scaife.
Reading through this column from Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times, (a column that begins with a reference to disgraced Republican Marjorie Taylor-Greene's quiet endorsement of Frazzledrip), I found this:
Contemplating Frazzledrip, it occurred to me that QAnon is the obscene apotheosis of three decades of Clinton demonization. It’s other things as well, including a repurposed version of the old anti-Semitic blood libel, which accused Jews of using the blood of Christian children in their rituals, and a cult lusting for mass public executions. According to the F.B.I., it’s a domestic terror threat. But QAnon is also the terminal stage of the national derangement over Clinton that began as soon as she entered public life. “It’s my belief that QAnon really took off because it was based on Hillary Clinton,” said [Mike Rothschild, whose book about QAnon, “The Storm Is Upon Us,” comes out later this year]. “It was based specifically on something that a lot of 4chan dwellers wanted to see happen, which was Hillary Clinton arrested and sort of dragged away in chains.”
"Frazzledrip" is a particularly crazie bit of QAnon crazie, as explained by Goldberg:
The lurid fantasy of Frazzledrip refers to an imaginary video said to show Hillary Clinton and her former aide, Huma Abedin, assaulting and disfiguring a young girl, and drinking her blood. It holds that several cops saw the video, and Clinton had them killed.Later, Goldberg writes:
Looking back to the 1990s, it’s easy to see QAnon’s antecedents. In “Clinton Crazy,” a 1997 New York Times Magazine story, Philip Weiss delved into the multipronged subculture devoted to anathematizing the first couple. He described “freelance obsessives, the people for whom the Internet was invented, cerebral hobbyists who have glimpsed in the Clinton scandals a high moral drama that might shake society to its roots.”
And guess what we find in Weiss' story? That's right:
In early 1994, [Ambrose] Evans-Pritchard had made his way to Arkansas along with several other professional journalists. One was Micah Morrison, a Bennington graduate who became an ideological samurai for Midge Decter at the Committee for the Free World, worked for The American Spectator and later signed on with The Wall Street Journal's editorial page; another was Chris Ruddy, a ferociously dogged reporter who says he lost a job at The New York Post partly because he would not let go of the Vince Foster story. Ruddy now works for The Tribune-Review, a right-wing Pittsburgh paper, and his stories are reprinted in newspaper advertisements around the country, paid for by the Western Journalism Center in Sacramento, Calif. Richard M. Scaife, an angel of the far right, owns The Tribune-Review and contributes money to the center.
Christopher Ruddy, Richard Mellon Scaife, and The Western Journalism Center.
We've seen these names before haven't we?
I realize there's a lot more to QAnon than the seeds planted by Scaife and the Clinton Crazies all those years ago. But those seeds were planted and they grew into the ideas driving the Trump mob that swarmed over the Capitol exactly a month ago.
Ain't life grand?
