I think these guys are to be taken largely in the same way as the Flat Earth Society. At the same time, while their message may be extreme, it is not necessarily wrong.
One of my few great English teachers was as a college freshman. He explained the difference between dead and living languages: Latin vs English, for example. In Latin, anything you write would be written in exactly the same way today as it was 1000 years ago, as well as 1000 years from now. But in English, all 3 will be different. Guaranteed.
The nature of English is about simplification. In the 80's, GB Trudeau had his Zonker Harris character on a kick to reduce the language to something like 27 words. Of course it's silly, but think about our language now (especially modern American English), compared to Shakespeare's time. And now we have the texting generation, where even just using full words is way too cumbersome.
The other thing about English is that it really is "mob rule". If enough people spell (or misspell) something for long enough, well guess what. It becomes the proper spelling. Like it or not. In my lifetime, I've seen "traveller" become "traveler". And "publically" become "publicly". The former I can deal with, but the latter still drives me nuts.
But what's the problem, really? I probably write 50+ emails a day, many of which can get pretty lengthy. I hate writing out "through", when I can write "thru". People may not always get such shorthand the first time, but after that generally it's fine. And if just a few more people adopt it every day, it's not long before you see it in the dictionary. (Especially with a little extra help from our friends at MS, and other vendors of "questionable at best" spell checkers.)
I think this is the message from that throng of (four) protesters.
