In the American Thinker this morning I summarize Rick Perry’s unsavory connections to the Muslim Brotherhood enabler Grover Norquist, his pro-Islam curriculum for Texas schools, and the extremely strange and still-unexplained behavior of his fanatical supporters on the Internet:
[…] While it is hard for any Republican candidate to avoid Norquist altogether, so all-pervasive is his influence and power, Norquist is clearly much closer to Perry than to other candidates.[…]
Which other candidates have fundraised for Norquist? Which have vacationed with him? […]
The Perry onslaught became particularly virulent when individuals and websites with a reputation for intellectual and journalistic rigor uncritically repeated to large audiences the falsehoods that were being spread about the curriculum. These falsehoods originated with an obscure blogger named David Stein, who falsely claimed that one teacher’s lesson plan, completed for an assignment in the teacher training program for the Perry/Aga Khan curriculum, was the official curriculum itself. Since this teacher, Ronald Wiltse, had completed a reasonably good lesson plan, this led many to claim — again, falsely — that there wasn’t anything wrong with the curriculum at all.
Yet what was most striking about the rapid spread of these false claims was their origin. David Stein’s blog, CounterContempt.com, in June 2011, just before the Perry firestorm, had all of 179 visitors all month. Yet somehow blogs with tens of thousands more visitors daily found Stein’s false claims about the curriculum and spread them far and wide in defense of Perry. The Iranian-American writer Amil Imani published a piece, “Governor Perry’s Islam Connection,” which retailed the false information about the Perry/Aga Khan curriculum on Islam for Texas schools that Stein originated. Imani relied for his information on the curriculum on a piece by Alana Goodman at Commentary. Goodman in turn relied on David Stein.
Others relied on Stein as well. Some conservative bloggers, including erstwhile friends and allies, responded to Perry’s candidacy with cult-like devotion, invoked Stein’s false claims, and asked me to delink them and denounced me because I dared question their god. One anti-jihad writer of some reputation for clear thinking about the reality of jihadist teachings and tendencies across the various Islamic sects suddenly discovered, in support of Imani and Stein, an obscure historian from the 1930s whose statements supposedly proved that the misleading and politically correct Perry Islamic curriculum for Texas schools was perfectly fine.
It was remarkable testimony to the power, as well as the anxiety, of the Perry faithful that David Stein’s obscure blog, with no readership, no history, and no reputation for credibility, could publish a false claim about the curriculum that so many big blogs would be ready immediately to publicize, while publishing the most outlandish charges against those of us who published the real curriculum.
How the big conservative blogs and even Commentary all found David Stein’s tiny blog has never been explained.[…]