"What Did Ron Paul Know, And When Did He Know It?"

Aw, come on. The man was busy: he had a medical practice to attend to, for crying out loud.

These passages bring back great memories. My husband and I spent some time on the outer extreme of anti-PC dialogue back in the 90s. We started with gun activists and other mainstream libertarians, and ended up hanging out with survivalists and State Citizen types. We found some of our dearest values, such as a belief in a small government and a desire for self-sufficiency, brought us into contact with people we could only describe to each other as "characters."

I'm not sure when, exactly, it was that we began to see all this as rich material for our respective writing. I only know that we immersed ourselves in it and found a lot to laugh at in some of the "black helicoptor" thinking—all the while agreeing that skepticism about media and government is an important virtue, as long as one takes one's meds.

We didn't personally know any racists or anti-Semites, but we were aware that they were out there, and their literature was even easier to find at State Citizen events than it was at gun fairs. One of our comrades-in-survivalism was black. I remember asking him how he felt about the fact that there were racists involved in the militia movement.

He shrugged, and pointed out that he and his wife were some of the best shots he knew. That seemed fair enough. I suppose they were betting against a race war within the survivalist fringe.

But, oh—if you ever get a chance to see a Linda Thompson video, do it. There's some great stuff there.

UPDATE: Turns out there a lot of this political identity theft going around.