Chris McDaniel, who wants to represent the state of Mississippi in the United States Senate, thinks it is time for America to “come up with an exit strategy” from the United Nations. Once a fringe view associated with the John Birch Society, the idea has made a comeback these days in the online bizarro-world of Alex Jones and Ron Paul fandom that calls itself the “liberty movement.” Watch:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/5Zm5yTX3f1U[/youtube]

We found that gem in the YouTube channel of Clayton Thomas Kelly, who was arrested last Thursday for breaking into a nursing home to photograph Rose Cochran for a smear video aimed at her husband Thad, Mississippi’s US Senate incumbent. Thomas has been charged with exploitation of a vulnerable adult and the hit piece has been deleted from his YouTube channel.

Clearly more dissonant than dissident, Thomas’s blog and Facebook page feature Ron and Rand Paul links, Breitbart.com fluff, Cliven Bundy propaganda, and the FreedomWorks “voter’s guide” to Thad Cochran. McDaniel’s campaign has repeatedly denied any relationship to Kelly or his dirty tricks, but the blogger endorsed the insurgent tea party candidate with his second blog post in February, and his support seems to have been inspired by McDaniel’s pandering to conspiracy theories about such topics as Agenda 21 and the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve is a chief culprit behind the economic crisis. Its unchecked power to create endless amounts of money out of thin air brought us the boom and bust cycle and causes one financial bubble after another. Since the Fed’s creation in 1913 the dollar has lost more than 96% of its value, and by recklessly inflating the money supply the Fed continues to distort interest rates and intentionally erodes the value of the dollar.

McDaniel’s fringe associations have been a matter of public record for some time: his Twitter account has retweeted white supremacists, and he gave talks to neoconfederate groups for years only to distance himself from them when he decided to run for national office. His primary challenge was identified by Politico as the greatest electoral threat to any sitting Republican Senator this year, and in fact polls had shown him pulling even with Cochran in recent weeks thanks to the enthusiasm of the tea party.

In a very real sense, tea parties have been a rebranding of the Bircher-style conservatism of the Goldwater era. Currently locked in a ‘civil war’ with party leadership for the soul of the GOP, the tea party movement seems a spent force outside the party itself, leading to speculation that party insiders will use Thomas’s arrest to marginalize tea party activists. McDaniel is clearly a fringe character, but it remains to be seen whether Cochran can frame him that way in the minds of enough Republican voters to win reelection.

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