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Sunday, April 13, 2014

The Paranoid Party



The left accuses the right of being deeply paranoid. Meanwhile the left is convinced that every Republican sneeze is a racial putdown of America's first black president since Bill Clinton.

Forget about looking for Communists under every bed. The proper progressive never lies down with his or her partner of choice and their government mandated birth control from the Catholic institution with no choice in the matter without first checking their privilege and checking for conservative bigotry.

Sometimes, somewhere in Kentucky or Alaska, a minor Republican functionary forwards an email depicting ObamaCare as the work of a voodoo witch doctor and the first lefty to discover it dines out on that triumphant accomplishment for a year before writing a book about it. The rest of the time, the McCarthyists of the left have to work hard to unpack the subtext of the overlay of the puzzle box of a random remark.

When Mitch McConnell complained that Obama plays too much golf, MSNBC's chief late night lunatic, Lawrence O'Donnell, barked that “Well, we know exactly what he’s trying to do there. He is trying to align to Tiger Woods and surely, the lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama.”

The famously Calibnasian Woods didn't actually identify as black, but that was probably because of the way Republican racism stigmatizes black people. Will the right-wing bigotry never stop?

After its collapse under Reagan, the reinvented Democratic Party runs entirely on outdated conspiracy theories about Republican bigotry. It complains that Republicans secretly believe that they're a secret Communist conspiracy to destroy America, while their entire platform is an accusation that the Republican Party is a secret conspiracy to enslave black people. 

Or as the famous admirer of articulate, bright and clean-looking African-Americans, Joe Biden said,  "He is going to put y'all back in chains."

The chains would be redundant considering that he and his boss have run up the national debt to $17.6 trillion or a post-racial slavery of $55,234 by every American, regardless of race or creed, owed to China, Japan, Brazil and the Muslim world. And it's easier to accuse Mitt Romney of wanting to bring back the 1850s (when Mormons were persecuted) than to have an honest discussion about the chains of debt already there.

The Democratic Party now runs on racial paranoia, on class paranoia, on gender paranoia; on an endless McCarthyism in which the Republican Party is savaged as a phantom Nazi cult dedicated to serving Southern racists, the Koch Brothers and Israel.

The sanest liberal of the 21st century makes the looniest member of the Birch Society in the 60s seem positively grounded in reality. Conspiracy theories aren't a fringe element in the Democratic Party now; they're the entire ticket.

The War on Women, the constant claims of racism (according to ex-MSNBC'er Martin Bashir IRS was the new "N Word") and the invocation of class warfare by wealthy residents of entirely white bedroom communities is a litany of conspiracy theories. The frenzied search for new IRS and Tiger Woods "dog whistles" that prove the Republicans really are out to bring back the 50s is the psychological breakdown of an entire political party taking refuge in political paranoia.

The progressives are reactionaries who can't run on their record and can't even run on the record of their political opponents. So instead they run on the imaginary record of their political opponents derived from reading their minds, unpacking their subtext and then reading a few tea leaves.

The bible of the left's conspiracy theory is a Lee Atwater interview from 1981 in which he described politics becoming post-racial. Since conspiracy theorists can always locate that one frame that proves that the plane heading for the World Trade Center was a hologram and the magic bullet that shot JFK was really fired by Jackie Kennedy, they carefully excerpted a part of the interview to make it look like Atwater was saying the exact opposite of what he was saying.

Based on that out of context quote, the left built its pyramid of racial paranoia, its obsession with a Republican "Southern Strategy" to prove that the real racists weren't the Democrats who fought for segregation, but the Republicans who fought against it, and its claim that since then the Republicans who fought segregation (but were secretly segregationists), unlike Democrats like Al Gore's father who fought for segregation (but was secretly against it), have hidden their racism even more deeply by calling for small government and lower taxes, which, if you own a special Noam Chomsky decoder ring, really means Supermegaracism.

The Atwater revelation, treated in progressive circles the way that a Rabbi admitting that the Jews really do run the world from a moldy Brooklyn basement would be by a Neo-Nazi group, became the basis for justifying a reverse Atwater.

If Republicans are covertly disguising their racism in low taxes and small government, anyone who believes in low taxes and small government is probably a racist. And since Republicans hide their racism in innocuous policies, any conservative policy must be another racist Trojan horse.

Everything is a conspiracy. Everyone is a conspirator. If a Republican supports X, it must be racist. If he says Y, it must be racist.

Understand that and you understand why MSNBC's cast of lunatics insist that IRS is the new N Word and that the Republican Party keeps mentioning Obama's golf game to suggest to its base of racist voters that he's really off having affairs with a string of blonde women.

Progressive racial paranoia makes perfect sense if you assume that your opponents are part of a conspiracy whose defining feature is a paranoid projection of your own racism.

That's why you can't win an argument with a conspiracy theorist. He already knows that you're going to deny everything because you're in on it. Every argument is deeper proof that you're a 749th degree racist Freemason who faked the moon landing while shooting JFK. (Sure the dates don't match up, that's what they want you to think.)

The racial Atwaterization of the Democratic Party, its Northeastern Strategy, is typical of conspiracy theorists, whether it's the Muslim Brotherhood's front groups or the LaRouche zombies, who engage in byzantine conspiracies and vicious underhanded attacks that are justified by their own worldview in which a vast conspiracy is being waged against them.

Think of Hillary Clinton invoking a "vast right wing conspiracy" in public while justifying her husband's adultery as being caused by Republican attacks in private, targeting women who complained about her husband's sexual harassment in private, while claiming to be a role model for women in public.

That gap between ideals and actions, ends and means, is typical of the conspiracy theorist who projects every evil onto a single enemy, an Emmanuel Goldstein or Dick Cheney, and acts out every horrifying power fantasy in order to destroy him without ever acknowledging that he has become the thing he hates the most. He has become, not Dick Cheney, but Dick Cheney as he envisions him, an abuser of the Constitution who uses the IRS as a political weapon, invades countries unilaterally and destroys political enemies with lies, smears and innuendo.

The Dick Cheney of the left's paranoid imagination sits in the White House. His abuses are justified by the paranoid belief in a vast right wing conspiracy of Dick Cheneys.

To the conspiracy theorist, law is only a tool of the conspiracy. There is no such thing as compromise, only the supreme entitlement of grievance. Anything you can do to your enemies is fair because they already did it to you... and worse.

Political paranoids are totalitarians... and totalitarians are political paranoids. The modern Democratic Party has become both. Its paranoid totalitarianism runs on conspiracy theories that justify its politics of personal destruction and its abuses of power. It has accepted the left's classic formula of the conservative political opposition as a reactionary force that is the source of all evils in society.

If the Republican Party and the conservative opposition embody racism so thoroughly and covertly that there is nothing non-racist about them, then there is nothing left to do but to destroy them. Having reduced the right to a total evil with no redeeming qualities, destroying them seems downright benevolent.

If the right really is totally racist, if even their most benevolent programs and policies conceal a hidden racist agenda, then there's nothing else to do but to destroy them.

There's no way to leave behind racism, except through the destruction of the Republican Party.

Ordinarily intelligent adults would have trouble taking paranoid ravings seriously. Or so you would think. But it's surprising how sensible even the looniest conspiracy theory can seem if you dress it up in a tuxedo and take it out for a night on Fifth Avenue.

9/11 Truthers, moon landing hoaxers and Holocaust deniers can sound polished and sensible even with low budgets. The JFK conspiracy theories have convinced millions because they were given unofficial support by a liberal establishment obsessed with redirecting blame away from the Communist who killed him and at the "right-wing culture of hate", not to mention the Cuban mob and everyone who was the exact opposite of the radical Socialist ideology that actually pulled the trigger.

Imagine how polished 9/11 Truthers, moon landing hoaxers or Holocaust deniers could seem if they had the resources of the New York Times, CNN, Disney, Harvard and Random House at their disposal. Paranoid conspiracy theories only seem cheap and shoddy if they're the refuge of a handful of mouth-breathers. Put them in the New York Times and on the teleprompter of every talking head in a ten thousand dollar suit, turn them into college courses and box office blockbuster movies and they begin to seem exclusive and intellectual.

Like treason, conspiracy theories never prosper. When they do prosper, no one calls them conspiracy theories anymore. Instead they are the pantless emperor, the big lie and the derangement of an entitled elite using lies and conspiracy theories to justify its abuses of power.

Totalitarian governments in Russia and Germany maintained a ruthless grip on power by circulating conspiracy theories so ridiculous that no intelligent adult should have believed in them. But that abstract optimism in human reason doesn't hold up to 5 minutes of MSNBC. It's entirely possible to be wealthy, well-educated and a MENSA member while believing poisonously stupid and malicious things that a child could disprove in 5 minutes.

It's not because they're stupid. Like Agent Mulder, they want to believe. They need to believe.

If the Democratic Party isn't the progressive force standing against Republican bigotry, then what is it? An alliance of urban technocrats, corrupt community organizers and corporations? A Socialism Lite party that is despised by most European Socialists for its backwardness? A machine for printing money and moving it around to its special interests?

The average MSNBC viewer, New York Times reader and progressive suburbanite is not interested in a close look at his political movement or its track record. Instead of giving him something to believe in, his party's media outlets give him someone to hate. His political identity is shaped not by what he stands for, teachers' unions, unsustainable debt and an incoherent foreign policy of platitudes, but by his resistance to the Tea Party hordes who want to put black people back in chains, put women back in the kitchen and put homophobes back in the CEO's office at the Mozilla Foundation.

The politics of paranoid hatred is the crutch of mental cripples who protect the source of their dysfunction by projecting it onto phantom enemies. It's Hillary Clinton with her unfaithful husband, her list of enemies and her conviction that the Republicans made him cheat on her multiplied a million times over. It's the frenzied MSNBC talking head who sees the N Word everywhere because it's inside him. It's an Attorney General who pursues racial grudges without ever admitting it while calling the country "a nation of cowards" on race.

The Democratic Party is broken. It's broken spiritually, mentally and morally. But that doesn't mean that it's defeated. It's often the dysfunctional and the deranged who temporarily succeed because they are driven by their own demons. The completely unfit are often the most determined to disprove what the voices in their heads are telling them. And they are exceptionally talented at convincing other people of the lies that they tell themselves.

The great tragedies of the last two centuries were brought about by men and women like these, obsessed, maniacal, filled with churning hatreds and fears, commanding crowds, spreading lies, manufacturing ridiculous philosophies out of thin air and spreading them like an infection on the wind.

The Democratic Party has been contaminated by the madness of the left through its alliance with the left. Its one night stand has developed into a syphilitic infection and it's slowly going insane. You can see the derangement in Nancy Pelosi, staggering through aimless rhetoric, or Harry Reid, burning with inchoate anger, telling increasingly implausible lies, doing anything to hang on to power.

One of America's two major parties has become deranged and the entire country is paying the price.


  1. Anonymous13/4/14

    The Democratic Party still runs on envy, not paranoia. As their hate is a symptom of their envy, their paranoia is the justification for their envy.

  2. Easy to blame this paranoia on an abstraction like the Democratic Party. The web has become an insane asylum. Every day, I encounter more people who are obsessed with finding somebody to blame for whatever ails them. Yes, they gravitate to the Democratic Party and the Dems amplify and coordinate their need to blame somebody into a political platform.

    As you've also discussed at length, the absence of religious ritual and indoctrination are driving this collapse into paranoia. I'm a Catholic. I was indoctrinated in the belief that I am a sinner. My consciousness was formed to a large degree by Confession. I was taught to look inside myself for answers, and to accept that the failures of my life were most likely to be self-generated. Absent this, people look outside for somebody to blame.

  3. Anonymous13/4/14

    For a good debate, I know it's not helpful to inject one's own experience, but not unlike other Americans, the Race debate hits a nerve.
    In my last job, which I held for over twenty years, I supervised a staff that was mostly professional Black women. Over time, we laughed and cried together, went to each others' special occasions, shared our love of shoes, and took pride in our work and accomplishments.
    Then Obama came on the scene, and all the Hillary support flew out the window, along with most of our affectionate bantering. Suddenly, people I thought I knew, were now on a mission, that they assumed I could not possibly understand. One even told me Obama was sent to them 'by God'.. She was a nurse practioner with a Master's degree. It is still hard to describe what appeared to be a group hypnosis, among people I thought I knew.. If anything, it hurt to finally understand that I never knew most of them at all. It was pretty surreal.
    These were well paid educated people, but before my eyes they turned into acolytes..
    Fortunately, I had enough time in the job to retire, so I did, never having uttered a word for or against Obama in my workplace. It might be a mistake to think all his supporters are lo-fo's, in my experience, they did not fall into that category at all.
    I would even venture a guess that some of them had not given a lot of thought to Race in their everyday lives, until someone told them they should, admittedly, I may have this all wrong, but that was my impression.


  4. The line about "a special Noam Chomsky decoder ring" caused me to imagine that if Jean Shepherd were writing "A Christmas Story" and these paranoid Democrats had input, the secret decoder ring Ralphie gets from Ovaltine would have a decrypted a message that said, "You're a white, privileged kid, and a racist. You pretend you're drinking brown people."

  5. Anonymous13/4/14

    ROLF Edward!


  6. Some of the most subjective and destructive people in the world are believers whose souls are blacked out. Their thinking under the influence of evil is totally distorted. Subjectivity from blackout of the soul is the basis for utopian thinking, world peace and disarmament movements, 'universal brotherhood' propaganda, 'the greatest good for the greatest number' socialist schemes that promote the 'welfare state' and 'redistribution of wealth.'

  7. Langston Pargeter14/4/14

    My people were Democrat since Lincoln was in diapers ,son. It is the truth that Republicans are privileged and drink brown people up for dinner in their race toward supreme domination of the world. Yes, you know I am right sir. It has only been the greatness of the Democrat Party that has kept these United States from imploding.
    Even now we see the horror of racism rearing it's ugly privileged head over what is so mockingly called Obamacare but which, in reality, is the savior of Western society as is and will be its namesake Mr. Barack Obama.
    Chomsky's decoder ring was once available here in Boston but the Brahmin's stopped that one quite quick too.
    Will the nefariousness of the Republican party never cease?

  8. Alphamail14/4/14

    The psychological breakdown of the left is far more than simple paranoia.

    It is paranoid schizophrenia.

    The real world political left is obsessed by feelings while the right bases reality on facts.

    In the spiritual the left deals in erratic ephemeral fantasy while the right is governed by tomes of historical text and millennia of faith.

    In human context it is as if the emotion and reason sides of the brain were at war, when in fact the optimum mental output would be both sides working in creative union.

    When feelings are allowed to define reality absent facts you have schizophrenia.

    The left is schizophrenic. It has no need for facts. It wants no facts. Facts are a threat.

    When facts don’t jibe with their world where everybody deserves to feel good and everyone gets a huggy-feely trophy for simply showing up, and they interfere with their vision of the rest of the world getting huggy-feely kudos, then facts need to be ignored, altered, or called lies and those espousing them need to be discredited or disavowed.

    Enter paranoia.

    Feelings are preeminent – if it feels good do it – don’t make me feel bad.

    The schizophrenic has no need for anyone who would question their feelings and their right to feel good…no one. To a schizophrenic this requires self to be god.

    The biggest threat to a schizophrenic – a progressive leftist - is the possibility of a real creator or anyone who might believe in our real God.

    A real God would be superior and could naturally preempt or question human feelings.

    So God Himself or any believer is now a threat and must be vilified and thwarted.

    The left embraces with gusto these feelings of paranoia.

    This is a political plague – a virus – an Obama Ebola which has spread through the national body of reason and morality and has infected an entire portion of society that now overlooks corruption, scandal, lies, abortion, Christian and Jewish demonization, even treason, not because it is the truth but because it is emotionally uncomfortable.

  9. Anonymous14/4/14

    Langston!... get a grip man!

    "...is the savior of Western society as is and will be its namesake Mr. Barack Obama."

    Really? This is proof positive of an "acolyte" who spews the same hate that you have masked for many years. I judge as Martin Luther King Jr. did ... by the content of your character. I seek to follow in the footsteps of great men to the best of my ability, tempered by my Christian beliefs. I can support men like Col Allen West and Dr. Benjamin Carson and Condi Rice, among others because they excel. They are intelligent, strong individuals who are not afraid to stand up for what they believe. I knew what Obama was when he first appeared and I tried to warn family and friends to my own detriment. And with some prescience, I also said that if elected to a second term, Obama would "unleash the dogs" because he would have nothing holding him back. Now look at how many supposedly successful (and rich) blacks are playing the race card.

    Take Eric Holder (please!), threatening a Congressman ... on TV! "You better not go there, buddy!" And yet no one had the balls to stand up to this punk-ass bully and say to him "Did you just have a brain fart? Did you just threaten a sitting US. Congressman? Contempt of Congress for Holder? Did Holder ever display his hatred and contempt for the white man! And I am not white but I know crazy when I see it and the Democrat party is crazy sick. I would have called him out on-the-spot!

    So you go right ahead and believe "... is the savior of Western society as is and will be its namesake Mr. Barack Obama." It is not true because even you don't listen to his words and watch his actions. All you know is the color of his skin and therefore grant him carte blanc while being lazy at understanding what he is all about. He is doing what he said he would do ... fundamentally transform" America. For this, he will go down in history, not as the savior but the first non-American President (and a muslim to boot) who destroyed the best thing in history, faults and all. And for this "we" will all suffer. But crazies abound, so let's just cut off our noses to spite the white man! If we cannot all aspire to be better then lets just bring everyone down a peg or two. Then you might "feel" better.

    1. Bill Inaz14/4/14

      "Noam Chomsky decoder ring"

      That's funny!

  10. DenisO14/4/14

    We all understand "religion", and know that once one is adopted, we must accept all the real and made-up history, traditions, and rules of behavior that go with it, without question. Socialism, now the Democrat Party here, has become the accepted and unquestioned religion of that "flock", and it works the way Nazism worked in Germany, Sharia and terrorism were and are justified and followed in Islam, as Communism's horrors were tolerated and followed; and more lemming examples, going back to the dawn of humanity.
    Every generation starts with no memory, just natural herd and fish-school genes that make following easy, and unless education passes, and stresses, the lessons of history to each generation, it is "human nature" for people to follow their adopted herd (religion). History's lessons are no longer taught,which was the first goal of the Left, and we see how easily it worked.
    The real monsters, among us, are the parents and the Teachers who know and will not teach. Those who were uneducated became innocent zombies, doing what they're told, and spreading the political plague, the Obama Ebola, which uneducated people follow, and will follow, until mankind learns the age-old lessons or destroys itself.

  11. Anonymous14/4/14

    To Langston Pargeter. Look in the mirror. The person you see looking back at you UTTERLY DEFINES the "Useful Idiot." Oh....BTW....I am white and my wife is black. She thinks as I do. So....i'm warning you LP....if you call her an "Aunt Jemima" she will kick the shit out of you....while I watch. Beware LP. Just a friendly warning. Now....go back into your *Imaginary Leftist World Of Your Own Creation* where you will undoubtedly be more comfortable. Ta-Ta!! (Greg waves excitedly)

  12. Horace Staccato14/4/14

    I hope the Democrats are right, and I hope the Republicans win. Unfortunately both parties are filled with cowards and traitors. The Republicans gave us the Diversity Housing Bubble; that insane project to turn semi-civilized, low-IQ Hispanics into White, Republican suburbanites.

    And even worse, these tools took the Bubble as a sign that we had a healthy economy, when it was just another fraud.

    The ONLY people in government who are decent Americans are Republicans, but they are in the minority. All in all, the government is now the deadly enemy of its own country in a self-destructive orgy of Leftist pathology.

  13. Anonymous15/4/14

    The RCC (Roman Catholic Church) used to warn about two opposing-but-frequent deviances in religiosity: idolatry or worship of a physical object ‘as is’ (e.g. Islamists’ approach to the Koran) and iconoclasm or destruction of symbols, often through swift changes (e.g. moral fashionistas or progressives). Both are destructive, the former is the newcomer’s mark the latter signals the end of a civilization when it becomes main street. They work well together because fashionistas in their quest for novelties make room for fanatics; then they are no longer needed and the night of long knives comes…

  14. Anonymous15/4/14

    Thank you for putting into words my thoughts, high praise to you Mr Greenfield! and coming a close second, The Ray Esquivel, thank you both. I have wrestles with this concept for so so long and to see it in print now from your hands, makes complete sense to me! Thanks for a well written word!

  15. Anonymous16/4/14

    I'm Not a democrat , But FYI Dick Cheney was one of the most evil humans to ever hold office. In any country -EVER. Obama and the communist scum he runs with have raped America for 8 years, Dick did it for 40+ years, and if he lives, he'll be back in 2016 with the next Bush to be anointed by the Neo-Con's (such a nice way to say The Nazi party) . The US government has become a whore house ,being traded back and forth between crime "families". The people involved in government are perverts , idiots, addicts ,criminals ,and I suspect far , FAR worse. Saying that one "party" is somehow "bad" or "paranoid" is to ignore the fact that this governance allows no one into it inner workings that doesn't hate GOD. We suffer from the same insanity and ineptitude that swept Europe in the 1920's and 30's, and I fear the same end, as people turn to the idea that a "leader" can save them. (The cult of R. Reagan .The cult of Obama) This is not the country my mothers family fled to in 1530 , Or my fathers family in 1699. This is no longer the "land of the free" where two party's govern justly. America is a one party crime empire. Believing that "voting" can save us is childish wish fulfillment. Believing that political party's and their antics are anything but staged entertainment to subdue and control the masses is madness.---Ray

  16. I didn't realize that believing black people could do just as well as white people without coddling them was racist. In the inverted reality of leftist post-modernism, anything is possible, even mandated.

    I've lived too long.

  17. I cannot believe that people here think that Langston Pargeter was being serious. People, it's called sarcasm. Ray, Cheney was bad, but not that bad. Still, the rest of what you say is right on.

    Awesome write up Dan. Sharing for sure!

  18. Anonymous17/4/14

    I wonder why the Democratics think that its a secret that they are a "Communist conspiracy to destroy America."

  19. thank you, this is excellent.

  20. Daniel, I love your stuff but you are wrong here. Democrat hysteria about "racism", "war on women", "homophobia" and other identity politics tropes are not paranoia or derangement but rather are a cynically calculated attempt to demonize their political opponents. And it is working because they have the media in their pocket.