On this day, May 4th in 2012, the far-right Heartland Institute displayed an entirely sane and rational billboard with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber pictured on it…
Classy, eh?
This met with howls of outrage and probably marks the beginning of the end or the middle of the end for the Heartland Institute as a useful-to-the-right player. Big donors to it fled….
Why this matters
What happens time and again is these right wing flak/flank organisations get overconfident, believe their own publicity get captured by the culture warriors and overplay their hand have to be disowned by the less-swivel-eyed but equally (more) ecocidal outfits.
Then the constituent parts of the machine are broken down and reconstituted. You saw it with the Global Climate Coalition by about 1996 (with their attacks on Ben Santer) – they were becoming a reputational risk for some of the more mainstream and cautious members. You see it with the Tasman Institute in Australia, and other outfits. Culture warrior-dom contains the seeds of its own destruction, to get all dialectical?
What happened next?
Kaczynski is still in jail, will die there.
The Heartland Institute is still around, heckling the Pope and spamming science teachers.