Conservative Paranoid Action Conference

Again, & as always, we pull what we find amusing, insightful or hurtful, & make no claim, good or bad, for anything we haven't quoted. That typed, here's the link & the guaranteed-to-be-good parts.

When “Friends of Hamas” inventor and Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro spouts off unhinged aphorisms to scattered applause — “Our enemy is the government", “The media has to be destroyed where it stands”, and “If you’re not making them cry, you’re not doing it right” — it riffs off a tired but tried and true script.

The whole scene all recalls Richard Hofstadter’s anthropological admonition that “The paranoid spokesman … is always manning the barricades of civilization ... he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.

[...]

The John Birch Society was expelled, as was the gay conservative group GOProud — both deemed unfit for conservative company. But there were still the self-styled knights of anti-socialism – The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property – passing out pamphlets on “10 Reasons to Reject Socialism” and “10 Reasons Why Homosexual ‘Marriage’ is Harmful and Must Be Opposed.”

There were ubiquitous glossy pamphlets from a group called America’s Survival that describe “Obama’s Plan for the Disarmament of Israel” “Obama’s Revolution and The Drugging of America” (featuring a photo of a wild-eyed Charles Manson, naturally), and, just in time to greet Pope Francis, a description of how “The Roman Catholic Church has been compromised philosophically – not only by infiltrators from the homosexual movement and Marxists, but by adherents of the so called ‘New Age’ philosophy.” Even the free Spanish language newspaper, “El Sueno Americano”, that piled up unread on stands, featured an article on 63 sites where drones were active in the USA, asking “is this the change you voted for?” For conspiracy entrepreneurs, the specter of King Obama and his benefactor George Soros is always lurking in the shadows of otherwise polite conversation.

When Hofstatder wrote about paranoids’ belief that their political enemy “makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced,” he could be credited with great prescience, if it weren’t for the fact that this is just a recycled script sold to enthusiastic new dupes.

OK, more than enough.