Wit & Attitude Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

O'Rourke's genius here is the way he dresses an argument about state power in the costume of a bar joke. "Religious nuts with guns" is deliberately abrasive shorthand: it invites you to wince, then forces you to notice how easily governments and media reach for caricature when they want to justify force. By repeating the phrase and then pivoting - "Hell, this country was founded..". - he flips the insult into a founding myth, making the listener choose between condemning the targets in Texas or condemning America's self-image.

The specific intent is less to litigate a single incident than to mock the moral confidence of the Clinton-era liberal state when it confronts culturally alien citizens. The line isn't subtle about its suspicion: when Washington calls someone a "nut", it's often auditioning language that makes coercion sound like sanitation. O'Rourke doesn't argue policy; he undermines legitimacy. He implies that the problem isn't merely that the government overreached, but that it forgot its own origin story: dissenters, zealots, armed settlers, all the messy ingredients we retroactively varnish into "Pilgrims" and "Founding Fathers."

"Plymouth Rock" is the punchline with teeth. It's a reminder that American reverence for beginnings is selective - we romanticize the piety, downplay the volatility, and pretend firearms arrived later, like an unfortunate software update. O'Rourke's subtext is that the distance between "extremist" and "heritage" is often just who gets to narrate it.