(H/T Instapundit) The pig being not David Neiwert himself – he’s more of a Equus asinus asinus – but instead Neiwert’s instinctive and inherent need to believe that evil rightwingracistfascist militias are coming to get him. I’m linking to it for Jesse’s sake; it’s an interesting corrective to a particularly nasty strain of left-wing propaganda. A sample:
A final thought. Suppose, for the same of argument, that Neiwert is right about the militias’ origins — that they were invented by militant racists aiming to recruit mainstream Americans “by appealing to their ‘libertarian’ ideals and their fears about guns and government power.” If that were true, the bigots’ plot was surely a failure. Whatever its origins, the militia movement of the ’90s had a life of its own, and the chief issues that commanded its attention didn’t have anything to do with race. Indeed, its cause celebre was the confrontation at Waco, where roughly half of the 80 Branch Davidians killed were not white. (The body count included five Asians, six Hispanics, and 28 blacks.) To make one last ’60s comparison: Students for a Democratic Society began as the youth arm of a far-from-militant band of social democrats called the League for Industrial Democracy. With time SDS exploded in both size and activity, breathing new life into several political perspectives — but not into the League, which embodied the Old Left the kids were rejecting.
Which brings the discussion full circle. You can’t predict what autonomous audiences will do with the signals they receive: not an Ozzy Osbourne song, not a Glenn Beck broadcast, and not a call to form citizen militias.
Having made that corrective, though, I think that Jesse should drop further attempts to penetrate Neiwert’s self-interest. After all, this is his blogospheric niche. That’s why people read him; he scratches a very particular and very specialized itch, so you can’t really expect him to acknowledge that he’s essentially providing fetishist services.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.