Back in late 2009, when many still believed that Sarah Palin was the future of American politics, left-wing filmmakers Chase Whiteside and Erick Stoll took their camera to a Borders book store in Columbus, Ohio, where the former Alaska governor was signing copies of her book Going Rogue. Whiteside and Stoll went up and down the line-up of Palin fans, conducting brief interviews, and then uploaded edited snippets to YouTube.

Surprise, surprise: The interviewees all sounded like idiots.

“She’s the epi … epitome of conservative-ness,” says one dazed-seeming fellow in a Pittsburgh Steelers jacket. “She gonna’ get the presidency!” Another woman added that Palin stood for “cutting taxes, making a more, um, you know, entre-pe-noorial, um, just, um, like, conducive environment for our country, you know?”

The video goes on for eight minutes like this. It quickly gets tedious. And we don’t really learn anything from it: No matter our place on the political spectrum, most of us sound dumb when someone suddenly puts a microphone in front of us and asks for our opinion.

Nevertheless, the Borders video got almost 2-million hits. And you can see why: It confirmed, in capsule form, the stereotypes that tens of millions of liberals have about Sarah Palin.

The political act of explaining why one likes, or doesn’t like, a particular politician or policy once required thought and argument — effort, in other words. Now, it’s so much easier: You just paste a single YouTube link to your Facebook page, and you’re done. On to the next issue.

Two years later, exactly the same trick is underway on the other side of the political spectrum: Lazy conservatives who instinctively are repelled by the Occupy Wall Street movement, but can’t be bothered to intellectually engage with the issue, are circulating their own YouTube hits — alleging not just stupidity and bad hygiene, but also anti-Semitism. A popular one (200,000 hits so far) called “Anti-Semitic Protester at Occupy Wall Street — LA” features a woman who declares: “The Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve … they need to be run out of this country.”

Armed with video snippets such as these, an American conservative group is running a slick ad suggesting that the Occupy movement is basically just one big Democratic-supported anti-Semitic jamboree. ” Links to their ad, and the accompanying anti-Semitism claim, are all over my Twitter feed. Opponents of Occupy don’t even have to watch the video: They can confirm all their pre-existing biases about the movement in 140 characters or less.

The reality about Occupy? That’s more boring. This week, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen — one of those Zionist Jews who supposedly are in danger of getting lynched by Occupy protestors — made his way to Lower Manhattan to observe the pogroms. He sums up his experience thusly: “Projecting an unvarnished Semitism, I circled the place, encountering nothing and no one to suggest bigotry — not a sign, not a book and not even the guy who some weeks ago held up a placard with the instruction to Google the phrase ‘Zionists control Wall St.’ Google ‘nut case’ instead.”

Cohen isn’t arguing that the anti-Semitic nuts who occasionally pop up at Occupy movements aren’t despicable. And neither am I. All recent mass movements, from trade unions and anti-globalization protests to Tea Party rallies and Canada’s Reform Party, attracted bigots. But intelligent people don’t judge a movement on the basis of the fringe haters they inevitably attract.

I’m old enough to remember the early 1990s, a time when starry-eyed futurists believed the Internet would make all of us smarter. We would learn new languages, surf newspapers from around the world, cultivate international pen pals, become more enlightened people by exposing ourselves to different opinions. Twenty years later, it turns out that all this was starry-eyed nonsense: All we want from the web is to have our own ideological biases read back to us in the most hysterical and entertaining form possible — preferably with neat little YouTube links that we can passed around to our friends.

Experts call it the “confirmation bias” — our natural psychological attraction toward data or anecdotes that serve to support our pre-existing attitudes and bigotries. And it’s something that always has been part of human nature. But the combination of social media with cheap online video technology has turbocharged the confirmation bias to the point where rational political dialogue is in danger of extinction.

In its place: rank partisans sending out links to the like-minded, along with the mantra for this new age: “Watch the video! I was right all along.”

Originally Posted at the National Post

My name is Jonathan Kay. I run the op-ed pages of Canada’s National Post newspaper. I’m a big fan of the Guardian, and I appreciate you taking the time to read this. Like all Canadians, I’m pleased when prominent publications in other countries take note of our little corner of the world. In this regard, I’ve noticed that the Guardian occasionally publishes columns about Canadian politics by Toronto writer Heather Mallick, who also happens to be a columnist for the Toronto Star. She is a lively stylist, and I can see why her writing would, at first blush, seem like a good fit for your outlet.

Unfortunately (and please understand that, as discussed below, I am writing this as a proud Canadian, not just as an editor at a competing newspaper), it also is well-known among Canadian media observers that Mallick’s columns are full of lurid and, in some cases, outright mendacious claims about our government. She is published in the Star as quasi-satire, not as a serious commentator on Canadian events. And I think you should know this if you continue to run her Guardian columns, which appear to be full of the same sort of irresponsible claims.

By way of example, a March 28 Toronto Star Mallick column claimed that Harper’s government is planning to “hunt down its enemies” in a manner that “verges on the Stalinist.” She also claimed — without any evidence — that Harper would eliminate all “government safety standards for food and medicine”; that Harper wants to put “guns on the street,” and institute a “system of academic McCarthyism.” Mallick’s May 3 Guardian column (“Canada’s cold new dawn”) is written in this same spirit — particularly the last three paragraphs, which bear no resemblance to reality — and also reflect Mallick’s odd and disturbing habit of casting hateful references on those who don’t happen to live in large coastal cities.

This is part of a trend, because many parts of Mallick’s Guardian columns are essentially interchangeable slurs against what she insists, without any evidence, is a racist, misogynistic Canadian government populated by, and for, fat individuals who are simpletons because they don’t live in Toronto. In a 2010 Guardian column, for instance, she wrote that: “[Canadian] Conservatives can’t stand people, particularly if they’re female, or second-generation Canadian, or educated, or principled, or not from Alberta, which is the home of the hard-right belly-bulging middle-aged Tory male.”

It’s not clear why you saw fit to print this. Bigotry flipped directly on its head is bigotry.

Of course, it is no crime to publish columns that are flat-out wrong — or even bigoted. But I doubt you do so knowingly. Just as I have only a limited idea of who is properly regarded as a mainstream pundit in the UK, you may be under the impression that Mallick is Canada’s answer to Robert Fisk or George Monbiot. Sadly, she’s not.

My newspaper, the National Post, is considered right-of-center in its editorial posture. So one might imagine that I am speaking as a partisan here. But Canadian progressives also have been outraged by Mallick — because of the consistently hateful attitudes she has exhibited toward people who are poor or come from rural backgrounds. In 2008, for instance, she wrote a CBC column analyzing the popularity of Sarah Palin among “white trash” (her words) voters: “Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look favored by this decade’s woman … Bristol has what is known in Britain as the look of the teen mum, the ‘pramface.’ Husband Todd looks like a roughneck; Track, heading off to Iraq, appears terrified. They claim to be family obsessed while being studiously terrible at parenting. What normal father would want Levi ‘I’m a fuckin’ redneck’ Johnson prodding his daughter?” (The column in question — one of a number of Mallick pieces that, somewhat bizarrely and obsessively, attempts to link right-wing attitudes to middle-aged sexual dysfunction — was removed from the CBC web site after numerous complaints, and Mallick flamed out of the CBC shortly thereafter. A CBC official described the piece as “viciously personal, grossly hyperbolic and intensely partisan.”)

To reiterate, it is nice to see Canada written about in the opinion section of a media outlet as illustrious as The Guardian. But the image of Canada that Mallick peddles — a sort of fascistic hellhole — is one that no Canadian I know would actually recognize. And to the extent her words are meant as satire, I suspect no one in the UK gets the joke (few in Canada do, either, I should add; though her Star column is certainly a popular feature among those zealous Harper haters who take her views seriously).

I have gone on for a while here. So thanks for reading, assuming you are still with me. Why have I spent so much time writing this out? Consider for a moment how you would react if there were a single British journalist who was a regular on the op-ed pages of one of Canada’s newspapers. Now imagine that this writer regularly wrote dispatches, datelined from London, describing England as a land of demented plebes living under the jackboot of a near-”Stalinist” dictator.

You would probably object, right?

I would, too.

Oh, and if you are looking for mainstream Canadian voices to grace your pages, there are plenty. Without even naming National Post writers (for fear of appearing self-serving), I can suggest Margaret Wente of the Globe & Mail, Andrew Coyne of Maclean‘s magazine and Michael Coren of Sun Media. All are excellent writers. And the Canada they write about, unlike Mallick’s, is an actual place on planet earth.

Best regards,
Jonathan Kay
Managing Editor for Comment
National Post

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Unreason. Hatred. Bitterness. Prejudice. This more or less summarizes the liberal chorus we heard in the days after the Tucson shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford. But all of the words quoted in the paragraph above were spoken or printed in 1963, immediately following the assassination of JFK. Then, as now, the American intelligentsia felt a reflexive certainty that what they’d witnessed was not an act perpetrated by just one man, but rather a mere symptom of a great body of societal evil.

Just as initial media commentaries about Jared Lee Loughner’s crazed act focused on right-wing opposition to health-care reform and immigration, many 1963-era journalists assumed that Lee Harvey Oswald’s act of murder was, in some vague way, connected to the Civil Rights Act. The day after JFK’s death, the Times printed an article entitled “Why America Weeps: Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought To Curb In Nation,” promoting the idea that JFK’s killer somehow stood in moral solidarity with “those who wanted to be more violent in the racial war.” Playing on this notion, President Lyndon Johnson would tell Congress, two days after JFK’s funeral, “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill.”

All of this was nonsense. Just as Loughner is a clinical lunatic whose views have nothing to do with politics or race relations (he once told his community-college professor that the numbers 6 and 18 are actually the same), so too was Oswald a devout Marxist whose views had nothing to do with conservative ideology. As James Piereson wrote in his 2007 book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution (to which this column is much indebted): “Oswald assassinated President Kennedy for political reasons connected to Cuba that were completely unrelated to … other social factors. [He] was not representative of any major group or cultural tendency.” (And, again like Loughner, “he recognized no conventional morality by which he might have been bound.”)

Even after all the reporting that’s been done on Loughner’s past, the myth that he is in some way emblematic of Tea Party culture likely will remain embedded in American political lore, just as left-wing conspiracy theorists still claim that Oswald was a front man for the CIA and the military-industrial complex. As the JFK example shows, the ideologically engaged mind is drawn to interpret every tragedy through the lens of pre-existing dogmas. (In this narrow sense, the liberals who claim Loughner to be a symptom of Tea Party America aren’t that different from the Westboro Baptist Church Christian fanatics, who claim Loughner’s rampage to be divine retribution against a godless America.)

Even the finest mind can be seduced by this dogmatic reflex. For years, I have been listening every weekday to On Point, a National Public Radio talk show hosted by Tom Ashbrook, a serious journalist who has born witness to genocidal hatred in Europe and Africa, and who is old enough to remember JFK’s death. Yet even he could not help himself from writing these words on Sunday: “This is the river’s edge. We’ve got to pull back. Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford’s shooter was 22. That means he grew up in America’s years of trash talk — of increasingly rash, intolerant, hate-filled talk. Years of framing disagreement as Armageddon and opponents as traitors. This has to stop.”

Variations of this were penned by a million different journalists, Facebook pundits, and Tweeters. All of them effectively rehashed on the 1963 Times editorial informing Americans that none of them could “escape a share of the fault for the spiral of unreason and violence.” And all of them missed the point that Loughner didn’t care a whit about any “trash talk” except that contained in his own sick head.

Sometimes, it’s not about us — or our proximity to the “river’s edge.” Sometimes, lone gunmen just go out and do horrible things. Five decades after Dealey Plaza, this is a truth that intellectuals still can’t accept.

The event was Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” a comedy and music jamboree on the Washington Mall. It was billed as non-partisan – with Jon Stewart playing the role of “sane” centrist jousting with faux-blowhard faux-fearmongering Stephen Colbert. But when I spoke to people in the crowd, it became clear that this was a solidly left-wing event. Not so much pro-Democrat – these folks are too jaded for party politics – as anti-Tea Party.

The Rally attracted more than 200,000 participants – three times what Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin got when they played the same venue to much Godly, right-wing fanfare a month ago. All those bodies would seem to translate into a mass political movement. But appearances can be deceiving: Most of the people I saw on The Mall aren’t engaged in politics as most of us would define it. It’s more like cultural commentary.

The signs on display said it all.

One trio at the rally dressed up in an Alice in Wonderland motif, and had a placard that read “I stopped having Tea Parties when I was 7!” There also was “Palin/Voldemort 2012,” “I like tea – and you’re kind of ruining it,” “America, not Americurr,” and “Free hugs! (from a militant atheist with a gay agenda).”

A lot of the signs didn’t even pretend to have any substantive political meaning- but rather were postmodern meta-jokes playing on the theme of protest, anger and simple-mindedness. These included “If your beliefs fit on a sign, think harder,” “I’m quite miffed,” “It’s the end of the month as we know it,” “Gay without any real agenda,” “DON’T kill all humans,” “I like protesting,” “I may disagree with you, but I’m pretty sure you’re not HITLER,” “Spell-checkers for piece,” “It’s a complex issue,” “I’m mad as Hell, … and eventually likely to do something about it,” “There is nothing to fear but fear itself … AND ZOMBIE HITLER,” “Feelin’ ok about things,” “I’m at a rally – this is a sign,” “That’s an interesting perspective – thanks for sharing!” and “Waffles are awesome.”

In other cases, the signs were almost too clever and precious. One fellow had a placard displaying a graphing of the hyperbolic function f(x) = 1/x, along with the words “Hyperbola! Not hyperbole!” His friend has a t-shirt with another common math function, along with the slogan “Science: It works, bitches.”

The people holding these signs – call them the Coffee Partiers – were superannuated versions of the clever high school kids who hung out in the corner of the cafeteria reading Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams (“The answer is 42!” read one of the signs on Saturday), and making fun of jocks. Now they’ve grown up and they’re making fun of Glenn Beck.

Tea Partiers say they’re angry about the state of American politics. But they at least embrace the basic forms of modern political expression – simple sloganeering, earnest appeals to dogma, scathing demagoguery. The Coffee Party crowd, on the other hand, is disgusted with all that. They are angry at America’s anger, and are reciprocating with irony and cleverness. They detest Glenn Beck, but could never embrace their own equally shrill anti-Beck. That’s why satirists such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are natural Coffee Party leaders, even if they cast themselves as non-partisan.

In Saturday’s National Post, David Frum wrote about the GOP’s growing dependence on older voters, who are more politically active than their children. What I saw on Saturday helps explain this trend: A young generation brought up on Comedy Central, many of whom think Beck and the whole media dynamic he represents is one big joke, it going to be hard to lure to the polls. “FOX News, you are making my mom afraid of EVERYTHING,” read one sign that crystallized this generational divide.

Irony and humor are great for making people laugh, and as an outlet for political disaffection – but they are no match for anger and earnestness when it comes to getting out the vote. When Wednesday morning comes, a lot of very clever people are going to be crying in their coffee.

At the National Tea Party convention in Nashville, the question going into Saturday night’s keynote finale from Sarah Palin was: How extreme would she get in order to ingratiate herself with her audience?

The answer: She didn’t budge an inch from the chipper, red-state messaging she’s peddled since John McCain picked her as his VP nominee.

At a convention marked by extreme speeches and occasional conspiracy theories delivered from the podium, Palin did not take the bait. Her speech was by far the most moderate of the three-day convention, and nothing she said would have been out of place at a mainstream GOP event.

While Tea Party leaders here have been accusing Barack Obama of hatching evil plans for a “one world state,” Palin didn’t say anything more nasty than that Obama was a “charismatic guy with a teleprompter.” She even gave Obama credit for sticking the course in Afghanistan, and plugging nuclear power in the State of the Union Speech — something no one else dared say at this Obamaphobic convention.

Nor did she make any claim to leadership of the Tea Party movement. Indeed, at two points, she very clearly said the movement should retain its leaderless, ground-up structure.

Not that anything she said was particularly brilliant. The speech was a color-by-numbers affair that read like it was a paragraph-by-paragraph summary of a stack of Wall Street Journal editorials. Drill for more oil. Don’t criminalize the war on terror. Lobbyists in Obama’s White House. Nationalize the healthcare insurance market. Stand by Israel. Don’t apologize for America. But she said it well, as she always does, and she threw in some nice shout-outs to Ronald Reagan (whose 99th birthday would have been today) and — more surprisingly — JFK and Goldwater. And, of course, there were the applause lines about her son in the infantry, and children with special needs.

There’s clearly a cult of Palin at this Tea Party Convention: Everyone I talk to here speaks of her in reverential, almost religious, terms. And so she didn’t have to go overboard to please the crowd. To her credit, she didn’t.

A Barack-Obama put-down every 60 seconds. That would be a concise way to describe the Tea Party National Convention in Nashville, which will draw to a close later today, following Sarah Palin’s keynote speech.

Steve Malloy, author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life, kicked off the Friday-morning proceedings by telling the crowd that America is controlled by the “Three-headed totalitarian monster of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.”

Hitting on what would become a major conference theme, he warned that Obama and his minions are conspiring to control every aspect of Americans’ lives – the color of their cars, the kind of toilet paper they use, how much time they spend in the shower, the temperature of their homes – all under the guise of UN greenhouse-gas reduction schemes. “Obama isn’t a U.S. socialist,” Malloy thundered. “He’s an international socialist. He envisions a one-world government.”

The next speaker, Memphis Tea Party founder Mark Skoda, put up a dramatic slideshow depicting heroes who’d risen up against tyranny around the world – the anonymous figure blocking tanks at Tiananmen Square, Lech Walesa, Iranian political martyrs … and then concluding with images from a Tea Party demonstration. The situation is just that desperate, apparently. The election of Barack Obama, Skoda said, was “the Pearl Harbor moment” of our time.

Then came celebrity Texas preacher and self-described “Christocrat” Rick Scarborough – one of the many overtly religious figures to appear at this convention. (Conference sessions often began with prayers). In a fiery speech that sounded like a Sunday sermon, he portrayed Obama’s America as a sinful hellhole now facing one last chance for salvation: “America has forsaken God. But the good news is that God has not yet forsaken America. And the Tea Party movement is the evidence, I believe, of that reality.”

*  *  *

This is a big moment for the Tea Party movement – the populist, grass-roots conservative cause that mobilized in response to Obama’s election and the massive recession he inherited. Born less than a year ago, the movement burst definitively onto the national agenda with a massive September 12 demonstration in Washington. Four months later, its supporters played a key role in Scott Brown’s upset Senate win in Massachusetts, pushing back the Democrats’ ambitious plans for health reform.

But despite their growing influence, Tea Partiers are still treated as a sort of kitsch curiosity by the mainstream media in the United States – studied more as human barometers of proletarian frustration in uncertain times than as a legitimate political movement.

This weekend’s meeting at the Gaylord Opryland conference center outside Nashville has given Tea Partiers a chance to change that. Their numbers are relatively small here – just 600 delegates, as compared to the 1-million-plus who swarmed Washington in September. But the speaking roster has been full of star-studded right-wing culture warriors.

Journalists from around the world showed up, asking the same question of everybody: “Why are you here?”

Tea Party organizers tend to describe their agenda with five bullet points: Less taxes, fiscal responsibility, greater liberty, state’s rights, national security. But that quintet – which also summarizes the major planks of the Republican Party – doesn’t really cover it. The Tea Party movement is mostly made up of refugees from the mainstream GOP. They rail hard against John McCain and other RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). Bipartisanship – “Koombaya politics,” as its derisively called – is dismissed as a sell-out.

As with other populist movements, it isn’t always totally clear where Tea Party activists stand on the left-right spectrum. Many of them are protectionists, in violation of Republican free-trading dogma. Their stance on immigration often flirts with xenophobia. The enemies of the movement comprise anyone who sits on the commanding heights of American politics, culture, business and media.

Barack Obama and his Congressional allies are the main targets. But the villain list also includes the big banks, China, Middle Eastern oil producers, bailed out corporations, James Cameron (Avatar is seen as a veiled denunciation of the U.S. military), Republican Party chairman Michael Steele, universities, the Washington Post, Anderson Cooper, and even FOX News pundits such as Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, who’ve heaped scorn on the Tea Party movement’s more militant oddballs. (One of the most bizarre moments of the convention came when blogger Andrew Breitbart delivered a particularly vicious fulmination against the mainstream media, prompting everyone to get up, turn toward the media section at the back of the conference room, and scream “USA! USA! USA!”)

Their ideological heroes, meanwhile, are all people who are either criticizing Washington from beyond its gates (Sarah Palin), or dead (Ronald Reagan), and thus protected from the taint of power.

The smug left-wing take on the Tea Party movement is that its members are nothing but shell-shocked racists. (In the words of Janeane Garofalo: “It’s not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea Party was about. They don’t know their history at all. It’s about hating a black man in the White House.”) I’ve seen no evidence of that sort of bigotry here in Nashville. True, the conference floor is an almost unbroken sea of white, middle-aged faces. But two of the speakers who’ve appeared at the podium were fiery black conservatives – including Washington, D.C. media personality Angela McGlowan, who received a series of massive ovations.

The Tea Party activists I spoke with despise Barack Obama not because he’s black, but because they believe he’s an out-and-out Marxist, as well as a loyal disciple of Bill Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah Wright (those two names came up in virtually every conversation about Obama this weekend). There is also a conspiratorial-seeming belief that Obama is determined to bring America down in the world, and sell out Israel to the Arabs.

One of the keynote speakers, WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah, spent roughly a third of his lengthy oration demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate – echoing the discredited “Birther” conspiracy theory that claims Mr. Obama to be a Kenyan-born foreigner, and therefore constitutionally disqualified from the presidency. Everyone applauded wildly at this nonsense. As the weekend progressed, it became clear that a speaker could hurl literally any slur he wanted against Obama, and people would scream enthusiastically and smack their hands together.

For people who claim they want to change America, the speakers in Nashville spent very little time discussing what they would actually do if they ran the country. Smaller government was the dominant theme – but not a single speaker, to my knowledge (I wasn’t able to attend all of the overlapping breakout sessions), actually identified a government program that should be cut, or how. Everyone agreed Obama’s healthcare plan would wreck America. But no one discussed how healthcare costs might be controlled under a status quo that has 17% of American GDP going to medical costs.

The explanation for this vapidity goes to the Tea Party activists’ self-conception as ideological heirs to the Founding Fathers. (Several of the delegates even dressed up as 18th-Century yeomen, to the great delight of media photographers.) The “Tea Party” motif isn’t just a clever name: In their grandiose statements, its activists really do present themselves as protagonists in an existential struggle for America’s soul – a mission that somehow transcends the dry bristle of ordinary politics.

“We’re in a crisis, a crisis as profound of the [American] Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, or World War II,” filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon told the crowd on Friday night. “You just have to ask the Kaiser, you have to ask the military junta that ran Japan in World War II, or the Nazis, or the fascists – no power on earth has ever stood against the common working-man part of this country.”

This statement seemed like a lunatic exaggeration – as crazy as anything I’d heard from the Iraq War-era activists who compared George W. Bush to Hitler. Yet everyone around me nodded their head and applauded, basking in the notion that they were the enlightened vanguard who would protect America. For all the jus’-plain-folks posturing of Tea Party activists, it is hard to ignore how massively inflated is their own self-regard.

*  *  *

Looking forward, Tea Party organizers have big plans. Another convention is being planned for July. And on Friday, they announced the creation of a new non-profit, the Ensuring Liberty Corp., to help hardcore conservative political candidates raise money. But my view is that the movement will soon start to fall apart, if it hasn’t already.

One problem for Tea Party organizers is that populist movements build up critical mass only during periods of crisis – and that crisis, in the form of America’s massive recession, already shows signs of easing.

A second problem is that every political movement – even one that calls itself “grass roots” – inevitably requires leadership. And absent the discipline imposed by a traditional, top-down political organization (like, say, the Republican Party), the struggle for leadership leads to bickering and factionalizing.

That process already has begun in the Tea Party movement, in large part thanks to the for-profit Nashville conference, which has alienated the lower-middle-class rank-and-file by charging $550 per ticket, and providing Sarah Palin with a fat speaking fee (widely reported to be on the order of $100,000 – though the organizers refuse to say one way or another).

Meanwhile, the tantalizing opportunity to seize the reins of a national political movement has drawn in a crew of ambitious, big-talking Tennessee amateurs who’ve been putting their faces all over this conference.

In protest, grass-roots Tennessee Tea Partiers staged their own dissident press conference just steps away from the official festivities – and for an hour or so, became the main draw among the journalist pool.

Such is generally the dénouement of all romantic populist movements: The will of the people soon becomes the will of the bickering few. It’s something Sarah Palin should have thought about before hitching her cart to the Tea Party horse.

Aside from Tom Tancredo’s creepy outburst last night about the education level of Obama voters, the Tea Party Convention in Nashville has gone more or less on script — putting a conservative face on a movement that, if not quite mainstream, is at least respectable.

That just changed with one long dumb speech from WorldNetDaily chief Joseph Farah, one of the leaders of the so-called Birther movement.

Farah started fine — heaping praise on the constitution, and urging America’s leaders to be faithful to it. He ended well, too, with a stirring exhortation to “take the offense in this struggle.”

But these flourishes were merely the bread in a lunacy sandwich — the filling of which were 10 solid minutes implicitly questioning whether Barack Obama is an American citizen. In 2012, he declared, every single election lawn sign should say: Show me the birth certificate.

It’s a silly line of attack against Obama — one that’s become the stuff of parody on late night cable shows. Even Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck have turned their back on the Birthers. Yet Farah’s cheap shots on this subject got big ovations. Message for the cameras: This is a room full of conspiracy theorists.

What’s worse, Farah wrapped up his Birther nonsense in Jesus’ garb, going on in semi-satiric detail about how the Bible documents Jesus’ lineage in a way that Obama cannot.

“I’m a follower of Jesus Christ!” Farah exclaimed to much applause. That’s fine. America has a lot of time for the devout. For the paranoid, less so.

At the Tea Party National Convention: They just gave an ovation to a shout-out to James O’Keefe…

Last seen getting arrested in a Senator’s office.

I’ve spent the day listening to speeches here at the Tea Party National Convention, and talking to some of the other delegates. For the most part, no big surprises: The folks are sociable, middle-aged, white (I think I counted two black adults in the whole room — though, interestingly, both of them ended up on the podium, giving speeches) and mad as hell that Barack Obama is conspiring with the United Nations to turn America into a socialist province of a One World State.

I think the one thing that really did surprise me was the high level of explicitly Christian social conservatism on display here. One of the “breakout sessions” featured a speech from Pastor Rick Scarborough — who is most famous for trying to get America’s preachers more politicized. (“I’m not a Republican. I’m not a Democrat. I’m a Christocrat.”) After his speech, a middle-aged female delegate with a twang stood up and said, during the Q&A, “All the media types are asking us why we’re here. Here’s what I say. We’re all here for a little R&R — revival and revolt. If you’re not a Christian, and a person of faith, you just can’t understand what we’re doing!!” She got a standing ovation.

At the time, I thought this might be just because this particular session was self-selected by Christian attendees. But an hour later, the lunch speaker was Roy Moore: the “10 Commandments Judge” who was fired from his position as Alabama Chief Justice when he refused to remove a 5,000-pound 10-commandments sculpture from his court building. (He’s now running for Alabama Governor — his volunteers are a big presence here.) Anyway, he gave a fire-and-brimstone speech that peeled the paint off the walls. He sounded, at times, entirely indistinguishable from an Evangelist at Sunday service, listing off the many reasons America is going to hell (militant gay activists, naturally, figured prominently). And the guy brought the house down.

During his whole speech, I kept thinking to myself: And to think that this guy used to be mandated by the state of Alabama to pass judgment on non-Christians, gays, and all the other heathen. Tea Party types tend to be strongly pro-Israel. But that aside, it’s not a particularly familiar place for a nice Jewish boy from Canada.

Even when newspapers started putting their articles online in the late 1990s, the daily grind didn’t change much: You’d file in the same way, and on the same schedule; it’s just that readers had two ways to access the article the next day instead of one.

Nor did most journalists change their routines much when blogs first became popular in the early part of this decade. Blogs were for amateurs. Real journalists stuck to deadline.

That changed when we all started realizing that 99.99% of blogs were of no interest whatsoever — and the other 0.01% tended to be written by — surprise, surprise — professional writers. Newspaper editors began bugging their writers to produce blogs on the side, engaging readers with extra details and insights that didn’t make it into the “real” stories.

In time, some newspaper writers became regular bloggers, with their best content being “reverse-published” in the print edition. The line between the two media became fluid to the point that now, in 2009, many newspaper columnists, editorial writers and feature writers — including me — are hybrid workers, repeatedly going back and forth from blog to conventional deadline journalism during the course of a day.

This existential shift in the nature of news and opinion journalism hasn’t really been studied much. As noted above, we have been so obsessed with the transformation of news outlets that we haven’t noticed the profound changes we’ve imposed on the humans who staff them.

The extent of the change can be measured (if only crudely) by sheer word count. When I began in this business a decade ago, I would crank out 500-800 words and go home. These days, I sometimes post 500 words on the National Post blog before I even leave for work. By the end of the day, I might blog more, as well as produce an article for the print edition. In a given week, it’s not uncommon for my colleagues and I to produce 5,000, or even 10,000, words apiece.

Putting aside the issue of quality (I’m not going to pretend everything I put on the blog, or even most of it, is up to the same standard as my triple-checked print articles) — I ask you the question: What other industry has seen such a productivity increase in the last five years?

But productivity isn’t even the most interesting part of the transformation: The whole generations-old linear workflow arrangement of journalism has been upended.

By “linear,” I mean the flow of articles from writer to deputy editor to section editor to copy editor to proof-reader to production editor to printing press to reader. I still follow a scaled-down version of that routine when it comes to the print edition. But in the case of the in-house blog, I upload my musings directly – straight from my fingertips to readers’ screens. And amazingly, it all goes up under the National Post brand – notwithstanding the possibility that I might have unwittingly included libel, factual errors, obscenity or something else that might embarrass or even compromise the newspaper. It’s the equivalent of Procter & Gamble letting its workers stuff their experimental, homemade toothpaste concoctions into plastic tubes and ship it out with a P&G logo. Thousands of journalist-bloggers are doing this very thing across the world right now – a situation that is at once liberating (for the writer) and terrifying (for the brand owner).

When senior editors give a writer the keys to an in-house blog, they not only lose ex ante editing control, they also lose control of his subject matter. By their nature, bloggers aren’t like beat reporters, whose assignments come from their bosses, who in turn get their marching orders in daily news meetings. Blogging is an exercise in quick-reflex reactivity: Good bloggers tend to get their posts up within hours, or even minutes, of breaking news – not enough time for decisions to be run through newspapers’ normal editorial chain of command.

This means that an in-house blogger is, by his very nature, essentially autonomous and self-directed – even if he works for a traditional, top-heavy, seniority-driven news outlet. In some cases that I’ve observed, it’s not even clear whom he reports to – and misunderstandings arise between online staff and section editors about what to do when corrections or revisions are needed.

Where things get truly complicated is when the same journalist has overlapping responsibilities for the print edition and an in-house blog – a common phenomenon now that newsrooms are laying people off and forcing survivors to justify their worth by combining roles. In the old days, a journalist who stumbled across an interesting topic at breakfast might have had to wait hours to pitch it to an editor, and then wait some more before getting a thumbs-up or -down decision. Now, a hybrid blogger-columnist has to make his most important decision instantly and privately: Does he blog the item? Or pitch it as a column? Or should he do both – the blog as a quick hit, and then develop it into a print article to pitch to an editor later in the day? Or perhaps a blog sandwich – blog-column-blog, with the follow-up blog post oriented toward highlighting interesting reader feedback and rebutting critics.

Usually, I’ve found, blogging first is the best strategy. Putting up a rapid blog post is a great way to gauge whether you’re onto a good subject (when the comments pile up quickly, you know you’re onto something) and flush out sources that help you produce a more thorough piece for the next day’s print edition. It also helps a writer avoid the lazy instinct that has him put off a writing project till just before deadline. Competition drives your fingers over the keyboard: The longer you take, the greater the chance some other blogger will beat you to the same point. (That’s one of the reasons that – by my observation – adding blog responsibilities to a print journalist’s job description actually serves to *increase* his or her print productivity. Instead of fussing all day over a single story in between trips to Starbucks, the writing process is driven forward by overlapping waves of urgent blog-driven fury.)

In other words, hybrid journalists aren’t just required to be their own editors. They’re also required to be their own *meta* editors, deciding interwoven questions of medium, timing, content and word count on their own initiative, hours before they subject their actual words to another human being for conventional editing.

There is no existing professional model to guide any of this. All of it is new ground – especially for authoritative, risk-averse media outlets that have developed their reputation for accuracy by layering editors upon editors and following rigid algorithmic workflow processes set down in manuals and worker-training programs. Suddenly, much of the show is being run by entrepreneurial, quasi-autonomous content providers choosing their own subjects and medium.

Hmmm . Entrepreneurship trumping central planning? I knew I’d find a way to bring this thing around to NewMajority’s conservative mandate.