Morning Maddow: Here's How A White Supremacist Set The GOP's Immigration Policy (Video)

Wednesday's Rachel Maddow Show begins with another of those rambly goofy stories that make you wonder whether a News Point is on the way, and then gets to the point and you say "Aha!" We won't even summarize the first five minutes, because you deserve the fun of watching them play out with the fewest possible spoilers (also, we're not sure where we'd start). Eventually, though, we find out how a near fistfight on a ski lift between a veteran Republican operative and an ardent white supremacist is a really good metaphor for the current relationship between the mainstream GOP and its wackaloon wing.

The comparison is especially apt, since the white supremacist in question, Richard Spencer, published a whole bunch of serious-sounding blog posts by one Jason Richwine, who likes to put an academic spin on racist garbage about how minorities are just too low-IQ to ever record. And as it happens, Mr. Richwine even crossed over into the world of rightwing think tanks, where he authored the Heritage Foundation's great big report on how immigration reform would cost America $6.3 trillion, which is only like a thousand times the cost of going to the moon was. Even though Richwine swore by his calculations, Maddow points out they might be iffy math, given that "his calculating machine was built in a beer hall in Bavaria in 1923, so maybe it doesn't count so well." And while the Heritage Foundation let Richwine quietly resign when all this came out, the report was never withdrawn: it's still official Heritage Foundation policy.

So. Guess what organization is now demanding a government shutdown over its well-thought-out objections to immigration reform? It's Heritage, though, not hate. Which, we'll admit, is largely just a matter of labeling now.

Also, because the only thing better than Angry Maddow is Delighted Maddow, here's her Best New Thing In the World postscript to this week's cool story about the German town that punked the neo-Nazis. Turns out that wasn't the first time the anti-Nazi group Exit Germany has trolled the jerks in an attempt to make them question their commitment, and Rachel has the t-shirt to prove it: