Bryan Fischer Has a Persecution Complex
Bryan Fischer wears a number of hats around the American Family Association (AFA). He is the group’s lead spokesperson, radio personality and attack dog.
Fischer also serves as the id of the Religious Right, saying “things that a lot of people on the conservative side of things think but they won’t say.” That observation is from someone who should know – Buster Wilson, the former general manager of AFA’s talk radio network.
But Fischer is so outrageous at times that it’s hard to know if people, even privately, agree with him. Right Wing Watch caught a great example of this on Monday.
Fischer was ranting on his AFA radio program about a briefing at Camp Shelby in Mississippi when he went off the rails. That briefing listed AFA as a hate group – which it is.
Fischer claimed that the U.S. “military is being conditioned to use weapons on the American Family Association.” American soldiers could one day surround the AFA, he claimed, because they’re “being conditioned in their brains to think of evangelicals, Tea Partiers, the American Family Association and the Family Research Council as domestic enemies that may have to be neutralized by lethal force.”
Fischer has a history of outrageous and inflammatory rhetoric. And, as Right Wing Watch pointed out, he has a history of claiming that the Obama administration is planning to use the military to vanquish its political opponents. In March he warned that “we're not that far away from having an armed federal military-style presence in the streets of our cities,” and almost a year earlier he claimed that the Department of Homeland Security was hoarding ammunition to use against Americans.
I think it’s safe to say that Fischer is either willfully misleading his listeners or has a loose grasp on reality. Regardless of his reasons, the corrosive impact of his rhetoric is the same.
