Salon reported earlier this week that disgraced former FBI agent and anti-Islam activist John Guandolo had claimed that John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee for CIA director, is “unfit for duty” because he is a secret Muslim.

Guandolo stated that “Brennan did convert to Islam when he served in an official capacity on behalf of the United States when he served in Saudi Arabia” and it “was the culmination of a counterintelligence operation against him to recruit him” by foreign operatives.

You might have thought that Guandolo’s accusation was so off-the-wall that even his fellow Islamophobes would distance themselves from this paranoid nonsense. But no. In a follow-up article Salon reports that Guandolo’s theory has been enthusiastically adopted by sections of the US right.