There's something to be said for having a more crazy group you can denounce and make yourself appear to be the sane one. But it's probably not a better strategy

There's something to be said for having a more crazy group you can denounce and make yourself appear to be the sane one. But it's probably not a better strategy than just being perceived as sane. Problem is the attention is gathered by the crazy soundbites, not the real complex questions behind them. When all the media bothers with are tweets anything longer than 140 characters is lost. "Reallocate some of the police budget to fund mental health workers" is apparently too long a slogan. As for the NSA, isn't that why people said encrypt everything though? The main question to me was could they store/process all the data they could possibly/easily obtain? The original stories were about them being able to store and search everything, which is clearly impossible, they had to target searches to capture small parts of the entire data stream and throw away 99.99999%, and they'd not cracked encryption on any useful scale either.