Culture

Who Is Nick Gillespie?

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And today's "er, what?" award goes to…The Hill's Bernie Quigley, who writes one of the weirder blog posts you'll see, under the headline "Tea Party wins … Who is Nick Gillespie?" All publicity is good publicity of course, and certainly all good publicity is good publicity, but…well, here's the lede:

Until this week Nick Gillespie was an unheard-of editor and writer except to those formidable few who admired his perseverance and looked forward to his rumpled commentary on Judge Napolitano's Freedom Watch.

Like Richard Farina in the rising folk scene of the early '60s, aficionados knew him to be the original item and deeply admired him. But no one else did. This weekend the most mainstream of conservatives, George Will at The Washington Post, favorably reviewed his book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America. Today he is cited in The Wall Street Journal's "Notable & Quotable." Nick Gillespie has arrived. And so has the Tea Party.

Links added.

As one of the world's bigger Bob Dylan aficionados, of course, it was the Richard Fariña analogy that particularly stung the previously unheard-of editor. (On Twitter, Gillespie likened it to "someone speed-bagging my scrotum.")

Check out Gillespie's voluminous Reason archive here, and his not-inconsiderable Wall Street Journal contributions & citations here.

Matt Welch is an editor at large at Reason.