The more I look at the political economy of the hard right, the more it looks like the script of a bad movie—it’s too incredible to be believed; the characters involved are cartoonish and the theories put forth by the characters are far-fetched—except for the mainstream media who all too often have swallowed right-wing propaganda hook, line, and sinker. Published works by the right are all the more absurd if you follow the money trail. For instance, previously I have mentioned Daniel Pipes, the author of Conspiracy: How The Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From. The book has some scholarly research but has one fatal flaw: the author’s blind spot regarding his own benefactor who is one of the most notorious and influential paranoid conspiracy theorists of the last part of the twentieth century: Richard Mellon Scaife. To have a book on the paranoid style that doesn’t mention Scaife is doing a musical without any music. Scaife--a believer in the notorious Clinton Body Count, a Freeper staple—poured millions in a dirty tricks campaign to smear Bill and Hillary Clinton with charges of murder. Scaife was conned by Joseph Farah (now of WorldNetDaily) into funding millions of dollars in newspaper ads to support the cause of Christopher Ruddy’s discredited theories that Vince Foster was murdered by the Clintons (when a wingnut like Ann Coulter called Ruddy’s book on the subject a “conservative hoax book,” we can be certain that it’s a crackpot theory). To be fair to Pipes, although he doesn’t mention Scaife by name, he alludes to Scaife’s activities. Pipes mentioned the report put out by the Clinton White House that detailed the media food chain of the paranoid smears of the Clintons (the report showed how Scaife-funded smears first published in right-wing rags like the American Spectator eventually made their way into the mainstream media). Pipe’s conclusion was not that the fanciful smears embodied the paranoid style; rather, the Clinton White’s attempt to track down how lies about it made their way into the mainstream press was “a conspiracy theory about conservatives.” That’s a gem of pure logic. Let’s look at the money trail of another right-wing author Michelle Malkin. Malkin takes a hard-line stance on immigration. Her WorldNetDaily columns and her book Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores gives her thoughts on the matter. On Malkin's website, she informs people that if they want a personally autographed copy of Invasion, they can go to the WorldNetDaily website and pay $27.95. This is where it gets interesting. Malkin sells her books on and writes for the WorldNetDaily website preaching to the American people the importance of getting rid of immigrants who are criminals and who do harm to American. How ironic it is that Malkin is preaching a strict immigration policy and hawking Invasion on a website that has a cozy business arrangement with noxious foreign national living in this country: Sun Myung Moon. Moon is a criminal foreign national living in the United States. Moon previously served time for income tax violations. But what makes Moon a particularly flagrant undesirable alien are his crimes against the woman whom he portrayed as his daughter-in-law Nansook Hong—who was not legally his daughter-in-law because she was not of legal age to marry Moon’s son. Let’s look at Nansook Hong’s charges (she was the topic of a 60 Minutes program and her story checked out). Sun Myung Moon arranged for an underage Hong (she was fifteen at the time) to be brought to the United States through immigration fraud. Once in the United States, Hong became the child bride of Moon’s deranged son in an illegal marriage. Hong lived in hell for the next fifteen years (if you have a strong stomach, you can read all about it in Hong’s book, In The Shadow of the Moons). Had Moon’s activities been discovered, his crimes would have earned him a stiff prison sentence followed by deportation (immigration fraud is a basis for deportation; also, Moon’s procurement of Hong for the statutory rape and illegal detention by his son are also grounds for deportation). If Malkin were sincerely concerned about undesirable aliens, she would work for Moon’s deportation instead of sucking on his sugar tit (sucking on Moon’s sugar tit is big for people on the right such as George H. W. Bush, William Bennett, and Jerry Falwell). I have previously written INS to look into Moon’s case but have received no reply; perhaps Malkin could start to practice what she preaches and use her pull to get Moon out of the country. I’m not holding my breath.