Yes, The Nation. “The flagship of the left.” They’ve blown the lid off this whole trumped-up TSA scandal:

Does anyone else sense something strange is going on with the apparently spontaneous revolt against the TSA? This past week, the media turned an “ordinary guy,” 31-year-old Californian John Tyner who blogs under the pseudonym “Johnny Edge,” into a national hero after he posted a cell phone video of himself defending his liberty against the evil government oppressors in charge of airport security. While this issue is certainly important—and offensive—to Americans, we are nonetheless skeptical about how and why this story turned into a national movement. In fact, this whole campaign feels a bit like déjà-vu: As the first reporters to expose the Tea Party as an Astroturf PR campaign funded by FreedomWorks and Koch-related front groups back in February, 2009, we see many of the same elements driving the current “rebellion” against the TSA: Koch-related libertarians, Washington lobbyists and PR operatives posing as “ordinary citizens,” and suspicious fake-grassroots outrage relentlessly promoted in the same old right-wing echo chamber.

If you want to know what the left is doing, just pay attention as they condemn their opponents. They think the Tea Party is astroturfed, and that they “exposed” it as such based on not a whole lot, because astroturfing is the only way they can get any support themselves. They think the groundswell against the TSA is manufactured because their own “outrages” are manufactured. It couldn’t be that people are genuinely disturbed by the sight of little kids and cancer patients being harassed by low-level government flunkies for the crime of traveling by air, because people like the staff of The Nation aren’t the ones telling them how to feel about it.

But wait, here’s the real bombshell:

So far, all we know about “ordinary guy” John Tyner III, the freedom fighter who took on the TSA agents, is that, according to a friendly hometown profile in the San Diego Union-Tribune, “he leans strongly libertarian and doesn’t believe in voting. TSA security policy, he asserts ‘isn’t Republican and it isn’t Democratic.’” [emphasis added]

Strongly libertarian! Yes, it’s a nefarious libertarian plot. As we all know, libertarians are highly organized and prone to groupthink, and nothing is more destructive to America than a citizen asserting his own liberty. (More on this from anti-government fascist Nazi Matt Welch.)

Remember one thing on National Opt-Out Day, people: Civil disobedience is noble and brave, unless there’s a Democrat in the White House.

P.S. Another gem from Mark Ames, the co-author of that groundshaking report in The Nation: