Jim Hightower

If you've followed the bouncing political ball through the past 30 years, you know that it has led us straight down the rabbit hole of right-wing extremism – from Ronald Reagan's almost-quaint conservatism to today's kooky, Koch-headed, right-wing fanaticism.

Surely, you might think, this dive has finally bottomed out, that it's both physically and metaphysically impossible to plunge any deeper into the darkness of political screwballism, right? Well, buckle up, for here comes Dr. James Kroll, trying to bore through the bottom and suck American politics down into the abyss of rabid, mad-dog right-wingism.

Kroll is a wildlife biologist from (where else?) Texas, and he's preaching that the problems with the Koch brothers' anti-government, laissez-fairyland extremism is that it just doesn't go far enough. Privatizing Social Security and public schools, says the professor, is child's play – but what about hunting?

Kroll is on a tear to eliminate the abomination of allowing hoi-polloi hunters to pursue game on public lands. If you want to hunt, he howls, you should pay to enter posted corporate preserves that are bounded by eight-foot fences and even-higher fees. He disparages those who support public parklands as "cocktail conservationists" and says hunters who want access to such lands are people who're "pining for socialism." Even worse, asserts Kroll, are government efforts to assure sustainable game management on public lands, calling it "the last bastion of communism."

Lest you think he's just a loopy voice in the nettlesome wilderness of privatization, Kroll's rabid right-wingism is already being embraced by the governors of Texas and Wisconsin. So look out, apparently the depths of no-government ideology go all the way down to right-wing hell.