For eight years, Republicans have tried to delegitimize Barack Obama’s presidency, falsely claiming that Obama was born abroad and therefore ineligible to be president and that he only won two consecutive elections thanks to massive vote fraud.

This concerted disinformation campaign worked: Polls have shown that most Republican voters believe that the now defunct liberal group ACORN stole both elections for Obama and that the president was born outside of the U.S.

Donald Trump, now the GOP’s nominee for president, helped push these myths that paint the president as an illegal usurper who should have never been allowed to take office, while congressional Republicans have refused to treat Obama as a legitimate president.

Now, the GOP is determined to delegitimize a potential Hillary Clinton presidency, declaring that she would be serving time in jail if it weren’t for a grand conspiracy between her campaign, the FBI and the Justice Department.

At last night’s meeting of the Republican National Convention, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie whipped the crowd into a frenzy as the audience repeatedly declared Clinton “guilty” of numerous crimes — including acting as “an apologist for an Al Qaeda affiliate” and negotiating “the worst nuclear arms deal in American history” — and shouted “Lock her up!”

Christie’s speech resembled a show trial more than a typical political address, promoting the message that has been propagated by Trump himself that Clinton should be in prison rather than running for president.

Ben Carson, who spoke later that evening, was more than happy to see that Christie transported Quicken Loans Arena to colonial Salem. The former presidential candidate once again attempted to connect Clinton to devil-worship because of her ties to the late activist and right-wing bogeyman Saul Alinsky:

One of the things that I have learned about Hillary Clinton is that one of her heroes, her mentors, was Saul Alinsky. Her senior thesis was about Saul Alinsky. This was someone that she greatly admired and that affected all of her philosophies subsequently. Now, interestingly enough, let me tell you something about Saul Alinsky. He wrote a book called “Rules For Radicals”. On the dedication page, it acknowledges Lucifer, the original radical who gained his own kingdom. Now think about that. This is a nation where our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, talks about certain inalienable rights that come from our creator. This is a nation where our Pledge of Allegiance says we are “one nation, under God”. This is a nation where every coin in our pocket and every bill in our wallet says “In God We Trust”. So are we willing to elect someone as president who has as their role model somebody who acknowledges Lucifer? Think about that. The secular progressive agenda is antithetical to the principles of the founding of this nation. If we continue to allow them to take God out of our lives, God will remove himself from us, we will not be blessed and our nation will go down the tubes and we will be responsible for that. We don’t want that to happen.

Clinton did in fact meet and exchange letters with Alinsky as a college student and even wrote a dissertation about his political ideas. But as the New York Times points out, while Clinton “endorsed Mr. Alinsky’s central critique of government antipoverty programs — that they tended to be too top-down and removed from the wishes of individuals,” she wanted to seek “change within the system” rather than through the outside agitation tactics championed by Alinsky.

And the relationship wasn’t exactly a secret: Clinton wrote about her time — and disagreements — with Alinsky in “Living History.”

On top of all of that, Alinsky’s ode to Lucifer was obviously not a call for Satanism but rather a figurative flourish, not that such a defense would stand up in a witch hunt.

As author Salman Rushdie noted, we shouldn’t “expect Ben Carson to recognize irony or humor.”