Muir's long time tradition of what I like to call shoutouts to his internet homies began from the very start of the strip. Of course, where he now does things like drawing avatars of paying fans visiting the cast, back then, he was generally referring to (or in a few rare cases drawing) online Right-wing bloggers, many of them being supporters of his strip. Muir loved this group, valorizing them as 'citizen-journalists' who told it like it was, and struck back at a subversive, incompetent mainstream media that Muir was convinced was biased against the Right. He repeated their triumphs, their stories and their talking points, sometimes word for word, and when something turned against them, well, he looked away.
As was so often the case, Muir was being taken for a ride. On some level, he allowed this to happen--most people are susceptible to being told what they want to hear, and Muir was especially prone, as he demonstrated during this time on numerous subjects and would go on to demonstrate to even greater amounts. Many of his 'citizen-journalists' were astroturfed young Republican party hacks, enjoying the patronage of various Right-wing organisations in the latest wrinkle of an infotainment ecosystem that had developed during the Clinton years. Not all of them, mind you, but enough of them. These were not the, for the most part, humble average citizens doing journalism in their spare time, but actual journalists doing subsidized partisan journalism while insisting they were humble and average.
Of course, the occasional independent figure did enjoy having their signal boosted by the more connected ones. Muir offers a good example of just how this ecosystem could work--a third-rate (and I might be being kind in my ranking there) webcomic artist getting a shot at syndication that he frankly did not deserve, because his comic caught the eye of a bunch of what amounted to low-ranking party functionaries. DbD was even featured and linked on the RNC webpage for a while. Looking at Muir's shoutouts at this stage, it's clear he has a rather sentimental attachment to this world, the exact sort of thing that is meant by 'parasocial bonds'. Muir was imagining a deep spiritual connection with people who were at best friendly acquaintances, at worst, people who viewed him as a cynical means to an end.
As usual with the Mystery Business(tm) Era, this is both a snapshot of an earlier time, and a foreshadowing of what would come. By the end of the Bush years, the Right blogosphere was largely consolidating to a handful of large, carefully curated sites with well-heeled backers. Many of the techniques used to kickstart it would get used again to create the Tea Party movement, and Muir (as we will see in future installments) lapped that one right up too. But in both cases, he wound up a good example of a problem the GOP and the Right weren't counting on, that constantly radicalizing your followers and telling to listen to extremist outsiders doesn't have a clear endpoint, and they will, eventually, wind up listening to actual extremist outsiders instead of the people you've chosen to play the part. When Muir talks about 'citizen journalists' these days, it's usually a crazy person screaming about conspiracy theories that don't help the GOP that much.
But that's the future, something we'll be considering in the next installment.
