If you’re trying to get a McCarthy-like anti-Muslim witch hunt taken seriously, it probably doesn’t help your cause to have an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist who is nostalgic for the days of Joe McCarthy to get behind your cause.

In a letter defending Michele Bachmann’s attacks on Muslim-Americans working in the Obama administration, five former security officials urged Speaker John Boehner, who has condemned Bachmann, to “acquaint yourself with the background and status of the Muslim Brotherhood’s civilization jihad in America.” The letter makes a number of provocative accusations: alleging that the Obama administration is “assisting the Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt”; “indulging the Islamist contention that attacks on Israel are not terrorist atrocities but legitimate ‘resistance’” ; and giving $1.5 billion to a Brotherhood government, even though the sum is actually going “to pay U.S. defense and security companies for contracts they have to supply equipment and support for the Egyptian military.” Signatories range from James Woosley, an ex-CIA director who is now involved with efforts to stop “creeping Sharia,” to Andy McCarthy, the former prosecutor that now espouses birther conspiracies and believes “that Islam is the problem.”

But another signatory who should raise eyebrows is Jerry Boykin, a former Lt. General who was reprimanded by President Bush for making inflammatory speeches about Islam while in uniform turned Religious Right activist. Most recently he was named vice president of the Family Research Council, a group closely aligned with Bachmann.

Boykin has maintained that “Islam is evil” and a “totalitarian way of life,” and therefore its adherents should not receive First Amendment protections. Boykin even wants the U.S. to ban mosques, telling fellow mosque-banner Bryan Fischer, “no mosques in America.” But his conspiracies don’t end there. He believes that a “cabal” led by George Soros and the Council of Foreign Relations is trying to “create a global government,” and that Obama, who may or may not be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood himself, is using the health care reform law to build his own version of the Brownshirts to impose Marxism on America. He also seems to think that the only difference between Islam and Marxism is that Muslims believe in a God.

While some Bachmann allies don’t like the McCarthy comparisons, Boykin in an interview just this week on TruNews with Rick Wiles praised McCarthy and said he wishes “we could find a McCarthy-like individual today that was willing to stand up and proclaim very boldly that we do have a problem with a Marxist cabal in America, which are now in powerful positions, influencing our policies and the direction of our country,” including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.