Right Wing Watch: The Week’s Weirdest Moments on the Extreme Right

Sept. 9, 2020

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Right Wing Watch: The Week’s Weirdest Moments on the Extreme Right

Right Wing Watch is a project of People For the American Way, dedicated to monitoring and exposing the activities and rhetoric of right-wing activists and organizations in order to expose their extreme agenda.

As Election Day draws closer, extreme right-wing commentators and activists are ramping up their already dark and divisive rhetoric, sprinkling in some claims and ploys so fanatical you'd be forgiven for dismissing them if they weren't so dangerous.

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has transformed into a prominent online pro-Trump commentator in recent years and has recently been using his popular YouTube channel to highlight some pretty amazing "facts." Namely that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and Satan share some eerily similar characteristics.

In a video posted​ Tuesday, Aug​. 25, Adams explained that there are only "two people who are famous for living underground": Joe Biden and the Prince of Darkness.

Adams went on to assert that Biden’s campaign slogan—“Build Back Better"—contained satanic symbols, with the number six being hidden in the capital B's of the slogan, meaning that the slogan was really code for 666. ​The rest of his claim is almost too ludicrous and complicated to explain: Adams went on to say that Biden's name itself likewise contained a hidden 666, whereby if you combined the J and O together, they formed a "backwards six," while if you turned the lowercase e upside down, that formed another six. Those two sixes combined with the six hidden in the B of Biden's last name formed 666, while the reminder of his last name—I-D-E-N—was code for "identity​." ​If you got lost following that chaotic claim, just know you're not the only one.

“666 identity. That’s what Joe Biden’s name actually is,” Adams said.

Who can argue with that?

And just in case ​accusing one of being buddies with Satan wasn't enough, shady right-wing ​political operatives Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl have begun rolling out robocalls targeting Black voters with lies and disinformation aimed at dissuading them from voting by mail.

In the robocall, a copy of which was obtained by Right Wing Watch, a woman identifying herself as "Tamika Taylor" warns that police will use information from mail-in voting to track down voters, that credit card companies will collect outstanding debts with the information provided, and even that the Center for Disease Control will use the information to force people to receive mandatory vaccines. Here's the robocall in full:

Hi, this is Tamika Taylor from Project 1599, the civil rights organization founded by Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl. Mail-in voting sounds great, but did you know that if you vote by mail, your personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts? The CDC is even pushing to use records for mail-in voting to track people for mandatory vaccines. Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man, stay home safe and beware of vote by mail.

Wohl and Burkman are notorious smear merchants who revel in leveling absurd allegations and spreading baseless lies and may soon find themselves in the cross hairs of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson​ who said in a tweet that her office “will use every tool at our disposal to dispel this & other false rhetoric & seek justice on behalf of every voter who was targeted & harmed by this vicious attempt at voter suppression.”

Perhaps Biden's supposed connection with Beelzebub explains why so many ​extreme right-wing Christian commentators have recently begun declaring that it would be a mortal sin for anyone to vote for him.

During a recent interview on a religious-right podcast, multimillionaire prosperity gospel preacher Kenneth Copeland proclaimed that any person who doesn't vote for President Donald Trump or votes for Biden in the 2020 election is "guilty of murder."

Not to be outdone, ​extreme right-wing commentator John Zmirak declared a few days later that any Biden voter would be committing a “serious sin” akin to murder for which they will have to answer to God on Judgment Day. Elizabeth Farah, the co-founder and chief operating officer of the right-wing conspiracy theory website WorldNetDaily, echoed that sentiment in a video that she posted Friday, Aug​. 28 in which she insisted that everyone is "obligated to vote for Trump/Pence in this 2020 election" because to do otherwise is a sin akin to doing nothing while one’s family is viciously raped and attacked by home invaders.