Thank You, Mom

In today's post on The Weekly Sift about the NRA leadership's fraudulent activities, Doug Muder spent some time talking about the book None Dare Call It Conspiracy, which is a recruiting document the John Birch Society published decades ago. Its last chapter encourages everyone who reads it to buy more copies and distribute them to their friends, thus furthering the cause (and the Birchers' conspiracy). As a byproduct, those sales would also make the author rich.

Muder's larger point — which he is not alone in making — is that "entering the conservative information bubble puts you in a high-grift zone." Right-wing media is full of ads for gold, multi-level-marketing scams, pseudo-medicines, and get-rich schemes. It seems that folks who watch and read this stuff are fools waiting to be taken.

At this point, I want to thank my dear departed mother. Way back in my early teen years, I remember her impressing on her daughters one through four that chain letters were never to be passed along in any form. They should immediately be discarded, no matter what they threatened.

It was a good lesson in skepticism that has stood me in good stead. I've seen virtual chain letters on Facebook, passed along by friends I respect. Sometimes they were innocuous in their content, but I stuck by my mother's admonition even then. These things should not be fed.

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Here's a depressing stat: last week, Fox News's evening line-up (Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, etc.) had the top ratings of all television shows. Not the top "news" channel line-up, not the top cable channel line-up... the top evening line-up among all channels, whether network or cable.