I had an interesting experience on the radio this past weekend. It might have been a telling one—I'm not sure.


On Friday I went to Chicago's public radio station WBEZ to tape a discussion on the week's news for American Public Media's show Weekend America. My co-panelists were comedian Dana Gold and comedianconservative congressional staffer Tara Setmayer. We were asked about the financial collapse. I said it was the fault of the conservative ideology of deregulation. She said it was the fault of Jimmy Carter. Because he passed what she misidentified as the "Community Reinvention Act."


Yes, well, that would be the right-wing smear du jour: the Community Reinvestment Act caused the meltdown, not greedy bankers and the oily politicians who love them. As regular readers at OurFuture.org know, we've called the idea a modern day equivalent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a Big Lie narrative that blames a despised, outcast social group for problems they had nothing to do with, in order to aggrandize the ability of the dominant group to hate and oppress.