Against jihadism -- consistently

Charles Johnson, one of the founders of the rightist blogosphere, has recently become increasingly disillusioned with the rising tide of crackpot ideas and paranoia within conservatism. In this short interview, he explains what drove him away:

But the main reason I can’t march along with the right wing blo-gosphere any more, not to put too fine a point on it, is that most of them have succumbed to Obama Derangement Syndrome. One “nontroversy” after another, followed by the outrage of the day, followed by conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, all delivered in breathless, angry prose that’s just wearying and depressing to read.

He doesn't shy away from identifying the real crux of the problem:

I’ve never been on board with the anti-science, anti-Enlighten-ment radical religious right. Once I began making my opinions known on issues like creationism and abortion, I realized that there just wasn’t very much in common with many of the bloggers on the right.....I think the Republican Party has a serious deficiency of real ideas, and the few popular ideas they do have are about pandering to the religious right and regulating private morality: abortion, gay marriage, etc.....In fact, in my opinion this is one of the main problems with the conservative movement today – the dominance of the religious right, which seeks to impose its own narrow belief system on the entire country.

Johnson was originally motivated to take up blogging by the September 11 attacks and the very real jihadist threat to Western civilization, but evidently came to realize that there also exists another religious-extremist threat to the values of the civilization -- one from within.

It's worth reading the whole interview. Never forget that there are rational conservatives out there, even if they are currently being shouted down and "purged" by the theocratic totalitarians and reality-deniers who have taken over the right.