Birds on the Brain

What strikes me about the spread of this story on right-leaning sites, including Fox News, and the conspiracy theories like the one above, is the strangeness of what worries the right wing and what doesn’t. I realize that once you go far enough right there are people opposed to the U.S. government, full stop. But among readers of Breitbart.com, The Daily Caller, and FoxNews.com, the coverage suggests there are a lot of people who aren’t particularly concerned about President Obama literally asserting that he has the authority to secretly order the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. On the other hand, a theoretical abridgment of liberty involving the Social Security Administration and hollow-point bullets is worth worrying about. You almost get the idea that if President Obama were to order them killed they’d mind it more if he did it with an agency created by the New Deal than by using a good old-fashioned Predator drone.