I'm also extremely grateful, of course, to the folks who have driven the lion's share of traffic my way: Atrios at Eschaton, Media Whores Online, Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft, Cursor, Eric Alterman and, most recently, Joe Conason.
I also want to say thanks to the army of fellow bloggers who've blogrolled me and continue to link to me throughout. I'm also extremely grateful for the many online friendships that have sprung up as a result. I'm afraid I'm not very good at reciprocating, but hope to amend that over the next few months.
Now that I've finished Death on the Fourth of July: Hate Crimes and the American Landscape -- it's now in the editing stages -- I'm going to have a lot more time to blog. And it looks like I'll continue to have plenty to blog about.
I have to admit that over the years, editors and others I've dealt with have tended to treat the kind of things I write about -- especially right-wing extremism and its various permutations, as well as the machinations of the American right in general, and especially the way these two interconnect -- with a great deal of wariness. They've often expressed the sense that there isn't really much interest in these matters from the general public, and that writing about them provides them with publicity more than it exposes them. And finally, they often doubt the real importance of these issues.
One of the great experiences with Orcinus is that it has confirmed for me, at least, the belief that there is more interest in these matters than most mainstream editors like to believe -- for the primary reason that they are in fact much more significant than the establishment-media view will admit. I think Tucker Carlson summed up neatly exactly what that view is the other day in his Salon interview with Kerry Lauerman:
- The classic flipside, which I've seen much more, is that you get some 62-year-old, semi-retarded cracker whose like the lone member of his chapter of the KKK, and he represents white supremacists. How many white supremacists are there in America? There are about nine, and they're all mentally retarded.
As regular readers of Orcinus know, this view is simply counter to the known facts. Of course, this kind of argument is not merely self-serving, it is precisely the kind of camouflage that enables the flow of extremist ideas and agendas from the far right into the mainstream. And that, of course, has been one of the chief topics at this little blog these many months now. As long as it keeps happening, I intend to keep writing about it.
I'm glad you've been reading, and I hope to reward your readership further in the coming months.
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