Mobying

Mobying is purportedly the tactic of attacking a political party by voicing dissenting opinions from the inside. The terms "mobying" and "moby" are commonly used on conservative blogging sites such as Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, RedState, and the like.

It comes from a Moby quote that was quickly seized upon and used as an excuse to declare all social conservatives trolls:

	“	No one's talking about how to keep the other side home on Election Day. It's a lot easier than you think and it doesn't cost that much. This election can be won by 200,000 votes. You target (Bush's) natural constituencies. For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you're an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion."	„
	—Moby, , a musician passing off old ideas as original thought

In the fantasy world that neocons inhabit, mobies are liberal trolls who pose as conservatives in order to accuse GOPers of violating their principles. In reality, most "mobies" are genuine conservatives who take a dim view of establishment Republicans like Giuliani and McCain and/or oppose the Iraq War.

A host of behaviors can cause one to to be labelled a "moby":

• Criticizing GOP frontrunners (especially Giuliani) as being socially liberal and willing to sacrifice principles for political expediency (true).

• Claiming the interventionist impulse to remodel the world in the name of democracy as being unconservative and Jacobinist (also true).

• Judging globalization and unfettered free trade to be harmful to the middle class and traditional American culture (again, true).

That many real conservatives, particularly paleoconservatives, hold these views is evidently ignored by neocon bloggers. To them, anyone who holds these views must secretly be a liberal bent on trying to troll said neocons into submission, despite the fact that many of these supposed mobies have written detailed blog entries about abortion, illegal immigration, etc.

It is possible that the term moby was invented simply to silence dissent from fellow conservatives or it may be that they genuinely believe their own delusions. Either way, very few mobies exist on the internets. --Richard Melville Hall 20:39, 7 September 2007 (CST)

Irl Mobies

• Pat Buchanan
• Barry Goldwater^✡
• Mike Gravel
• Ron Paul
• Tom Tancredo

See Also

• Free Republic
• Little Green Footballs