So we all know
Duck Dynasty's patriarch Phil Robertson is a bigot, and a homophobe (
I wrote about him in The New Republic, if that's something you care about), and a
fraudulent country club Republican dressed up like a bayou redneck to move more units of redneck product, and generally he's about as useful to the rest of the world as a copy of
The Second Sex is to his audience the minute they realize there are no pictures in it.
It's not in spite of this that Sean Hannity has him on his Fox News show but because, since Robertson's brand of retrograde politics moves the same number of duck calls as it does Hannity merch. It's tempting for people on the left to see Robertson on Hannity's show as some kind of error or the bad luck of last-minute booking—which is mostly the fallacy of liberals thinking that the things they belly laugh at can't be cherished and defended by someone else with just as much sincerity. Robertson unironically calling on America to convert-or-kill ISIS as a means of dealing with the horror of ISIS converting-or-killing everyone else is a welcome opinion to the right set of ears, and college-boy tittering about how this sounds like Innocent III scouring the Languedoc of Albigensenes or any previous Pope scouring the Holy Land of Muslims amounts mostly to smug nerds playing to their liberal audience as much as Robertson's duck call goes out to his people on a certain frequency.
Which is to say that, since no minds will change and nothing will be accomplished in any meaningful way, the most you can do is goof off. If there is a larger point, it will be lost, and it was probably a stretch to even assume it was necessary, so go have fun or go home.
