Drafted

I haven't read Rolling Stone in a while, so I hopped over to see what was new. I read their long-form piece on James O'Keefe and the implosion of Project Veritas. It's interesting, but I really didn't think of it as being very newsworthy. I remember Mr. O'Keefe's time in the media spotlight, but was never really that interested in him. And, in the end, the story feels like a reminder of something that people already know.

Most conservative culture warriors no longer perceive the U.S. political divide as two factions that disagree with each other, but as a war between real Americans and godless communists working to destroy the country.

Of course they perceive it as a war. That's why they call themselves "culture warriors." What else does one expect? Just like the people who see the fight for social justice call themselves "Social Justice Warriors." The term may prompt eye-rolling in the greater society, but the ones I knew wore it with obvious pride. There's always something to go to war over in the modern United States, as more and more of what were once the ordinary disagreements between citizens (disagreements that one would expect in a nation whose main coastlines can be 2,500 miles apart) have come to be viewed as existential matters of Good versus Evil and/or life and death, sometimes literally.

And in a society in which neutrality is viewed as either a craven capitulation to the unjust side of the argument at best and a cynical refusal to acknowledge one's support for deliberate wrongdoing at worst, it's seemingly become fashionable to fight over which side the people who emphatically are not fighting are fighting for. Which is how it goes, I suppose, when the fighting itself becomes the point.

Because if the only acceptable course of action when confronted by evil forces bent on destruction is to fight, fighting can become less about actual prosecuting the conflict and take on an air of virtue signalling, where it's important to be seen to be fighting, and for the right side. And what was really James O'Keefe's genius; he understood that it didn't matter if he were actually gathering evidence of deliberate wrongdoing, hypocrisy and malfeasance. As long as he was affirming what his audience understood to be true, the fact that he needed to resort to duplicity and entrapment to do so simply showed that he was fighting, and the need to continue to do so.