I suspect that Hannity's comments may have precisely the opposite effect as intended.
A lot of people may just drop by FR out of curiosity, never having heard of it before Hannity's comments. They will decide for themselves whether it is worth staying (either as a lurker or a participant).
Mr. Robinson, I have a question and a favor please. I suspect that your WEB programs have the ability to track WEB page hits as well as those who join FR. Therefore, the rate of joins and hits could be plotted vs. time. I would love to see these plots, over a time scale of a few weeks, centered around Hannity's comments. It would be interesting to see if there were a correlation.
A final comment. Immediately after the Bush re-election, there was a thread of those who were FReepers and had voted for Bush, along with our credentials. There were scientists, professors, Ph.Ds, engineers, businesspeople, Medical Doctors,... just about every possible profession you can imagine. And the credentials were extraordinary. The simple fact is that the FR community is pretty da** well educated and accomplished.
And the simple fact is that most of us are a da** site more educated and accomplished than Sean Hannity.
It's funny. But when you talk about education and credentials, it can be spun and the educated are elite and the non-educated are rednecks or worse. Or it can be spun that you have a well educated group of posters on the forum and few non educated participants. Also, remember, many of the people on Art Bell and George Noory have credentials coming out of their wazoos.