Birnbaum’s show numbers for the day were actually about 1 percent below average; fewer than a million people heard his rant live, streamed to the listening implement of their choice. Within ten minutes of the rant, however, the archived version of the rant started picking up listeners. Relatively slowly at first, the archived version’s numbers began to climb as more political sites linked in. Within two hours, the archived version reached another million people. Within three, it was two million. Within four, four million. The show archive’s hits grew at a roughly geometric rate for several hours afterward. Overnight there were seven million downloads of the Voice in the Wilderness PDA ’gram. By the next day’s show—a show devoted entirely to the subject of the Colonial Union, as were the next several shows—the live audience was 5.2 million. By the end of the week, it was twenty million live streams per show.

Like a crack in an overburdened dam, Birnbaum’s pro–Colonial Union rant created a rapid collapse in a polite silence from various political quarters, followed by a swamping flood of agreement with Birnbaum’s vituperation for the current administration position of holding the Colonial Union at arm’s length. Birnbaum had occupied a sweet spot in the media discourse—not so influential that he was unable to promote a potentially unpopular (and possibly crazy) theory, but not so obscure that he could be dismissed outright as a kook. Too many Washington insiders, politicians and journalists knew him too well for that.

The administration, wholly unprepared for the tsunami of opposing views on this particular topic, flubbed its immediate response to Birnbaum and his followers, beginning with the unfortunately clueless deputy undersecretary for space affairs who had called in to Birnbaum’s show, who was so thoroughly dismantled by Birnbaum that three days later she tendered her resignation and headed to her home state of Montana, where she would eventually become a high school history teacher.

At least she was well out of it. The government’s response was so poorly done that for several days its hapless handling of the event threatened to eclipse the discussion of the Colonial Union itself.

Threatened but did not eclipse, in part because Birnbaum, who knew a good break when he saw one, simply wouldn’t let it. From his newly elevated vantage point, Birnbaum dispensed opinion, gathered useful tidbits of information from insiders who, two weeks before, wouldn’t have given him the time of day, and set the daily agenda for discussion on the topic of the Colonial Union.