The Palins' un-American activities
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, at a rally in Vienna, Ohio, on Sept. 16, 2008. — “My government is my worst enemy. I'm going to fight them with any means at hand.” — This was former revolutionary terrorist Bill Ayers back in his old Weather Underground days, right?
Context & Ripple Effects
This Salon opinion column lands in the middle of the October 2008 campaign's character-war phase, days after reporting that Palin had used another private e-mail account raised questions about her transparency as Alaska governor. The piece's move is rhetorical jujitsu: it takes the Ayers 'terrorist' association attack being aimed at Obama and quotes an anti-government line — 'my government is my worst enemy' — to suggest the charge fits the Palins themselves.
First-order effects
- The McCain-Palin ticket faces a fresh framing battle in the race's final month: an opposition narrative that recasts the Palins' own anti-government rhetoric through the same Ayers lens their allies are using against Obama.
- The piece adds to a week of compounding scrutiny of Palin personally — alongside the private e-mail reporting — forcing campaign resources into defensive message management rather than offense.
Second-order effects
- Both campaigns are pushed deeper into opposition-research and guilt-by-association warfare, where each side's surrogates amplify the other's most extreme-sounding quotes rather than policy contrasts.
- Media outlets on both sides learn that transgressive 'un-American' framing drives engagement, incentivizing more opinion journalism built on rhetorical inversion rather than new reporting.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, anti-government rhetoric migrates from a smear deployed across partisan lines into an organizing identity inside mainstream conservative politics — a lineage visible in later coverage of Glenn Beck's revolution-themed rallies and activists like Amy Kremer, who helped organize the January 6 rally.
- Campaigns increasingly become contests over which side can define the other as outside the American mainstream, degrading shared standards for what counts as legitimate political dissent.
The trend: This piece is an early data point in the transformation of 'un-American' accusations from campaign-trail attack ads into a durable, self-reinforcing populist identity on the American right.