monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

A cabal of leftist “deep state” government workers, “globalists,” bankers, adherents to Islamic fundamentalism and establishment Republicans are conspiring to remove President Trump and impose cultural Marxism in the United States, according to a former White House aide whose darkly worded memo detailing the alleged conspiracy got him removed last month from the National Security Council.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

A cabal of leftist “deep state” government workers

These sorts of ideas are not new. Most are featured in John Birch literature and the others are of the same sort but with a modern coloration. So it is probably a good opportunity to cite Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics again.

Since the second world war, numerous professors of ethics or theology and several science fiction writers have fretted over the question of whether a seer or time-traveller, knowing what Adolf Hitler would go on to do, could be justified in killing him as a preventative measure. Stephen King fictionalised this dilemma in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone, in which a man sees that a rising populist politician will become an American Hitler, and agonises about whether assassination would be a patriotic act.

Now Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland, after publishing 2015’s The Third Woman under his own name, has re-Bourne the pseudonym under which he previously produced five conspiracy thrillers. In To Kill the President, a White House legal aide spots a plot to murder a recently elected controversialist president who, though never named, seems familiar.
Unexpectedly winning an election against a female Democrat who attracted criticism for being unwise with her email service, this “cheat and bigot” has dismayed the political and media establishments with “the tweets, the lies, the grotesque misconduct, the acts of unwarranted aggression”. He also does things of which Donald Trump has not yet been accused, including grabbing a female aide by her genitals in the Situation Room, where staff have been summoned in the middle of the night because the President wishes to nuke North Korea and China.

Although Armageddon is averted in the opening chapter, the fear that the leader intends to use cruise missiles as a sort of super-Twitter leads more moderate American patriots to seek out a Lee Harvey Oswald of our days. The conspiracy is spotted by Maggie Costello, an Irish-born diplomat who featured in Bourne’s The Last Testament (2007) and The Chosen One (2010).

In another thread, the burden of Finny's phony intellectual analysis was to the effect that those killed and injured in Charlottesville were themselves responsible for the attack.

Quote:

Antifa is an acronym for an anti-fascist group.

Apparently anti-fascism is the political and moral equivalent of fascism. But that does match a pattern. Those protesting racism are as guilty as racists of racism. Also, I guess, the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto uprising were no less to blame for violence than were the nazis.