THE CRAZINESS STARTED LONG BEFORE TRUMP

This seems bad:

A county Republican Party organization in Minnesota recently hosted a dinner featuring a keynote speaker who told attendees that George Floyd’s murder was a hoax https://t.co/6mH5qwCoAi

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 24, 2021

ZUMBRO FALLS, Minn. -- A dinner hosted by the Wabasha County Republican Party last month featured keynote speaker Trevor Loudon, a far-right conspiracy theorist who told the GOP faithful that more than a hundred members of Congress should be investigated for espionage, that the killing of George Floyd and the unrest that followed "was planned since 2016," and suggested that voting machines were rigged in last year's presidential election....

The event was promoted on Facebook by Beverly C. Roche-Snow, Wabasha County GOP chairwoman. When contacted by Forum News Service, she hung up the phone.

According to this news report Loudon said, "We need to investigate about 100 of your Democratic colleagues for working for foreign governments and the communist and Islamic movements," and said of George Floyd's murder, "This was planned since 2016, folks. This was all organized by a group headquartered in Minnesota called the 'Freedom Road Socialist Organization'" (a Marxist group that actually exists, though it had no impact on my feelings about the Floyd murder, given that I'd never heard of it until just now).
And there's the usual nonsense about rigged voting machines and COVID as Chinese biowarfare.

Here's a response to the tweet above:

Serious question: Was the GOP filled with this much nuttery before Trump? The racism may not be new, but the conspiracy-laden insanity? Were these people just waiting to be unleashed?

— NC Vates (@NCVates) April 24, 2021

But this is nothing new. Loudon has been on the circuit for years, starting in his native New Zealand.

It was in 1986 when Loudon first became involved in politics, establishing the Campaign for a Soviet-Free New Zealand. The group aimed to expose a conspiracy involving the Soviet Union secretly subverting the “New Zealand way of life” through a slew of shadowy puppet figures the Soviets controlled and ordered to do their bidding with the goal of turning the country into a communist dictatorship.

This fight to expose the Marxist “master plan” involved gathering information on anti-nuclear activists, Labour Party members, pastors from the National Council of Churches, anti-apartheid campaigners and Indigenous Māori community leaders — all of whom Loudon claimed were communist subversives which he exposed to his community of 800 followers through his newsletter, “New Zeal.” ...

From this exposure, Loudon ended up fast friends with Fox News host Glenn Beck, who used his platform to interview Loudon on numerous occasions.

The linked Beck interview took place in 2011. Prior to that, Loudon appeared at a 2008 gathering in D.C. at which he said that then-candidate Barack Obama was"a member of an organization [that is] openly a front for two socialist groups." The gathering was organized by America's Survival, Inc., a group founded by an old-guard right-wing rabble-rouser, Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media. Loudon and Kincaid wrote a "report" in 2009 that attempted to link Obama and others in his circle to a wide range of radical-left organizations.

Glenn Beck gave a blurb to a book Loudon published in 2011:

Subsequent Loudon books included 2013's The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress and 2018's Burn This Book: What Keith Ellison Doesn't Want You to Know: A Radical Marxist-Islamist, His Associations and Agenda.

The earlier work and the Beck connection made Loudon a popular speaker during the Obama presidency:

So this is nothing new. We're just starting to pay more attention now.