I was listening to the GCN radio network here in Austin, which has a weird survivalist (US-style) Libertarian motif. All the sponsors' ads are about converting your currency into real precious metals like silver or gold, ads for purifying water tablets to drop in your water because the government is either not doing this, or they are putting too much fluoride, etc., in it. Also ads about legal knowledge that can help you live tax free, live off the grid, less dependent on "the system," Loompanics-type stuff.
This is just a depressingly huge strand of American political thought. I think a lot of the people that hold these ideas are actually folks the left failed to organize - but who would otherwise be the most receptive -- representing the poverty of real class war analysis in the US. I think it was Chomsky who said in the 1930s these were the same kind of people the CIO and related labor groups were organizing. But in contemporary USA they're just cut loose into the twilight void of conspiracy theory and survivalist-type stuff.
-B.
John Gulick wrote:
"I am puzzled by one thing though. Why is it that the comments section is disproportionately filled with contributions from a motley crew of hard money cranks, goldbugs, conspiracists, anti-NWO'ers, diehard libertarians, and other assorted right-wing types?"