Lunacy in better focus

Glenn Beck's use of the racially coded phrase "Planet of the Apes"  in yet another of his idiotic rants caused the TheRaven to ponder his target audience.

Congressmen Bob Inglis' remarkable interview with Mother Jones revealed a genuine conservative's perspective on the Tea Party. Inglis is the real deal. He's about as far from liberal as you can be without crossing the line on delusionalism. He offers a compelling case for the Tea Party as a collection of crack-brained wing-nuts.

The very next day another piece has fallen into place. This post on AlterNet is reporting that a Massive Censorship at Digg has been uncovered. Digg is the leading social media website.As reported on AlterNet:

"A group of nearly one hundred conservatives have banded together on a Yahoo Group called Digg Patriots, and a companion site at coRanks to issue bury orders and discuss strategies to censor Digg and other social media websites. Digg Patriots was founded on 21 May 2009. This group is the heart of a complicated web on various networks, including Twitter, Propeller, StumbleUpon, YouTube, and Facebook, all dedicated to ramming an extreme right wing viewpoint down the throats of those communities and censoring opposing viewpoints. 

This includes such means as cyber stalking, bullying, and terror, as exposed on YouTube yesterday (something not one of the Digg Patriots group condemned).  Not surprisingly, there is also a heavy contingent active on the ultraconservative FreeRepublic.There are a few differences of opinion within Digg Patriots, although for the most part, they are extremely similar in perspective.

• They hate Obama. 
• They hate progressives. 
• They hate the UN, diplomacy, and peace/disarmament efforts. 
• They hate reforms of health care, Wall St., and immigration. 
• They hate science, in fact many are creationists, and some even blog about it.
• They hate the secular nature of our nation. 
• They hate environmental protection, requiring polluters to be responsible for their own cleanup, and especially hate climate efforts. 
• They hate unions and any attempt to level the playing field to give all Americans economic opportunities. 
• They hate the government, except the military-industrial complex. 
• They hate abortion rights. 
• They hate public schools and really hate higher education. 
• They hate anyone in the media except far right personalities like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin. 
• They hate anyone who doesn’t think Obama is a secret islamist and/or marxist who was born in Kenya. 
• They just love to hate.

Although this is a fringe group of Teabagging wingnuts, many well established figures in the Digg community are also present..."

The only thing worse than wing-nuts is well-organized wing-nuts. A tip of the hat to the folks at Digg who ferreted out this nonsense and put a stop to it.

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UPDATE 1: TheAtlantic discusses an idea that may seem radical to right-wing extremists: we are each entitled to our own set of opinions, but we aren't entitled to our own set of facts. Abandonment of truth in the Internet age is yet another manifestation of the Law of Unintended Consequences. The Atlantic piece opens with Alternet's discovery of Tea Party trolls carrying on like Grant's wolves. Read all about it, here.