BEYOND GAFFNEY: MORE CONSPIRATORIALISTS FOR CRUZ

You may have already heard that Ted Cruz has announced his foreign policy team, and it includes one particularly prominent conspiratorialist:

The list includes Frank Gaffney, a conspiracy theorist who has spent years advancing the idea that American society and the government are being systematically infiltrated by Muslims bent on imposing Sharia law, and he has also indulged repeatedly in the theory that President Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen....

In a 2008 column in The Washington Times, pushed a few weeks before the election, Gaffney wrote: “Another question yet to be resolved is whether Mr. Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, a prerequisite pursuant to the U.S. Constitution. There is evidence Mr. Obama was born in Kenya rather than, as he claims, Hawaii.”

Gaffney continued to talk up the Birther conspiracy theories, such as in a 2012 interview he hosted with right-wing columnist Diana West.

Gaffney has also repeatedly accused longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin of being an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood, calling her the “ticking time bomb” for Clinton’s campaign.

... he accused anti-tax activist Grover Norquist of being a secret agent of the Muslim Brotherhood.

But Gaffney isn't the only tinfoil-hat wearer whose support for Cruz we learned about today.

At The Washington Post, Robert Costa writes about the anti-Trump gathering convened by Erick Erickson and other prominent conservatives. We're told that the assembled right-wingers are now focused on a strategy of backing Cruz in the primaries, as one quoted participant makes clear:

... a consensus emerged by the end that the best option may be working in upcoming primaries to boost Cruz and hope to prevent Trump from securing a majority of delegates and making a convention standoff the culmination of those efforts, the people said.

"I support Ted Cruz," said Mike Farris, an influential Virginia conservative, as he stepped onto 17th Street NW shortly before noon Thursday, waving off questions from reporters.

That would be Michael Farris, founder of Patrick Henry College and the Home School Legal Defense Association -- a guy who thinks that the UN wants dictatorial control over the upbringing of children who wear glasses:

Farris was featured on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360° on December 7, 2012 as a leading opponent of U.S. ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, modeled after the Americans with Disabilities Act. The treaty, already ratified by 126 countries, calls on participating countries to work to attain equality in access to education, healthcare and more, and was based largely on the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.... Despite strong support from groups such as Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Vietnam Veterans of America, the treaty failed on December 4 to garner the two-thirds vote in Congress necessary for ratification, largely because of opposition from HSLDA and Heritage Action for America.... Host Anderson Cooper noted that during the campaign against the treaty, Farris stirred opposition by making the claim that U.S. ratification could give the UN control over American children who wore eyeglasses.

Yes, really -- here's what Farris said:

... the definition of disability is not defined in the treaty. My kid wears glasses, now they’re disabled, now the UN gets control over them; my child’s got a mild case of ADHD, now you’re under control of the UN treaty. There’s no definitional standard, it can change over time, and the UN, not American policymakers, are the ones who get it decided.

Do you have time for one more? This endorsement happened last week, but Right Wing Watch spotted it today:

... people who hate gays sure do seem to love Ted Cruz, and to that ever-growing list we can now add Mark Creech of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, who endorsed Cruz last week....

Creech is [the] sort of right-wing activist who asserts that "hunger is rampant in India" because the people there have not embraced Christianity and that President Obama could be the Antichrist....

He stated that the push for gay marriage is an attempt to rape society: "... I suggest the defying of marriage laws by gays and lesbians in California, New York, Illinois, New Mexico, and Oregon -- the foisting of the issue of gay marriage on the country by judicial activists sympathetic with the gay agenda -- is an attempted gang rape of our culture. It is an attempt to sodomize our society."

And that's just in one day's news.

So you really want to embrace Cruz as a safer alternative to Trump? Please proceed, Republicans.