Movin' On Up: The Year The Fringe Went From The Outhouse to the Penthouse
Christine Frapech
Allegra Kirkland December 23, 2016, 3:00 PM EST
TPM's writers have long tracked the moves of certain characters that compose America’s conspiracy-courting radical fringe and extremist right-wing. The 2016 election turned that coverage model on its head, as these previously little-known or under-the-radar personalities repeatedly cropped up in cable news interviews or allied with GOP presidential candidates.
President-elect Donald Trump's fondness for conspiracy theories and harsh anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric made individuals like Infowars’ Alex Jones and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach recurring figures in mainstream political news coverage. They're just two of several longtime subjects of interest at TPM who really broke through to a national stage this year.
Ammon and Ryan Bundy
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Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore
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White nationalist Matthew Heimbach
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Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach
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At the 2016 Republican National Convention,Kobach leveraged Trump’s lack of interest in policy to push through an arch-conservative GOP platform calling for a wall on “the entirety of the Southern Border” and an amendment opposing any restrictions on the sale of high-capacity-magazine weapons. Now a self-proclaimed member of Trump’s immigration policy transition team, Kobach has pressed the President-elect to reinstate a post-9/11 registry of immigrants from a number of countries, most of which are majority-Muslim, that he'd helped devise for George W. Bush’s administration. Those goals were revealed when Kobach was photographed at Trump Tower carrying a visible “strategic plan” for the next administration under his arm.
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