re: #151 stabby

Conservatives like their manipulation maximal, like the story of heaven and hell. Fail to toe the line and you’ll be tortured forever!!!! Conform and you’ll be blissful forever!!!

Not just blatant manipulation but maximal blatant manipulation.

Now apply that principle TO EVERYTHING. If you do something that will inconvenience them slightly (such as pay for social security for non-white, non-christians) then you are a communist who is trying to destroy christianity and the west … MAXIMAL manipulation. Maximum demonization. THAT’S the pattern.

You’re right:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

Paranoid Style in American Politics