The Paranoid Style

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Douglas Mercer
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Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm

The Paranoid Style

Post by Douglas Mercer » Sun Jan 12, 2025 4:10 pm

Douglas Mercer
January 12 2025

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.

Nothing is what it seems


On November 21 1963 Richard Hofstadter gave a lecture in Oxford, England on the subject of The Paranoid Style In American Politics, and the very next day John Kenned was assassinated. This confluence of events is enough to make one paranoid, as if the world itself were a Psy Op.

Hofstadter was born in 1916 to a Jewish father, Emil A. Hofstadter.

In the book that flowed out of this lecture Hofstadter goes on to enumerate what he calls the paranoid style; of course the Critical Theorists would soon have their hermeneutics of suspicion, but this was a high minded look at the vagaries of consciousness and the illusion of “truth”, where the Paranoid Style was aimed foursquarely at the rubes and the low class right wingers, the unwashed “nuts.” Kennedy himself called the stalwart denizens of Dallas nuts, as he turned to his wife on the plane zeroing in on Love Field telling her that they were now entering Nut Country. Hofstadter attacks the “crazies” like Joe McCarthy and his followers and the Birchers who believed that Eisenhower was a traitor. This famous essay by a Jew is now ground zero in the attempt to battle the “paranoids” and essentially is a cover for the Jews to run their vast plans and schemes of subversion and then gloss it over by having an allegedly heavy weight academic say like the keystone cop: nothing to see her sir, please move right along. The Russian Revolution was a Jewish affair? Nonsense scream the learned. The stab in the back? Nothing but the sour grapes and sordid gripes of losers. The Protocols? A forgery by the gods! Eisenhower ordered the murder of Patton? It simply can’t be, now you are through the looking glass and well down the rabbit hole. For their piece de resistance in deception another Jew (Arthur Miller) delved back deep into the American past and psyche and showed us the ruin of all witches. And surely those Puritans were the prototype of the classic paranoid, seeing witches under every bed. And so “witch hunt” became the watchword, that crazed right wing lunatics were always looking for witches. But as we all know nothing good will come from this hail Satan business.

Reversal is how the Jew works. And the reversal of truth in so brazen a manner is nearly enough to make one paranoid. After all if pure evil can masquerade as truth and justice what else is in the offing?

How does Hofstadter’s thesis hold up to the light of history? How does it appear in the cool of the evening? When Minerva’s Owl readies her flight?

Let’s take a look at the record

The Venona transcripts show that McCarthy was correct in all of the particulars. Alger Hiss was as guilty as sin. Roosevelt killed tens of thousands of American men by funneling materiel from the Pacific to Stalin to battle the Germans. A man in Idaho said secret plane flights were going across Alaska to send secret shipments to Stalin to fight the Germans, all of it off the books (nothing so see here sir!). Patton was not in Berlin for a week when he said that Berlin was giving him the blues. He said we had fought the wrong army. At a meeting in Paris Eisenhower told those assembled that in war things often go wrong, and that soon they would all have to testify to Congress and that they should all get their stories straight and their ducks in a row. Patton spoke up and said, in so many words, to fuck that noise. Patton was told he could not say that. Patton said he could say anything he liked. The last thing that Eisenhower wanted was for the notoriously loud-mouthed Patton to be going around America telling the truth. So he put out a contract hit on him.

Toward the end of his life Patton's son-in-law in Pasadena was funneling him literature about the true nature of the communist plot. A man who only cared for war Patton was only at the beginning of his ideological odyssey, but he was now on the track and path.

It is 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.

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.

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.

We are manning the barricades of civilization and we live at a turning point.

And paranoia is just a euphemism for seeing the truth.

When you have your psychotic break make sure it is clean and pure and good and true.

And then reach for your revolver.

It’s clean up time. And the truth, as the Poet sez, will out.


***
Notes:

At the end of his life Whittaker Chambers feared that the cause of truth was doomed.

In his classic tale of paranoia (Bleeding Edge, 2014) Pynchon has a character who obsessed with scents and with Hitler say he is going to find the "living Hitler." His girlfriend then says, wait, you never called him that before.

Like Aleister Crowley when he wrote the Book of Thoth, Thomas Pynchon put everything he had into Bleeding Edge, possibly his last major novel, with the desire to pass on a lifetime accumulated knowledge of the Hermetic transmission. The opacity of the esoteric levels of reference, surfacing occasionally to draw the attentive and willing reader into the TP multiverse of significance, means that you can read this novel and enjoy it solely as fast-paced and intriguing detective story and barely notice the esoteric rhizome network behind the scenes.

Douglas Mercer
Posts: 10474
Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm

Re: The Paranoid Style

Post by Douglas Mercer » Sun Jan 12, 2025 4:28 pm

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Douglas Mercer
Posts: 10474
Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm

Re: The Paranoid Style

Post by Douglas Mercer » Sun Jan 12, 2025 4:29 pm

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Douglas Mercer
Posts: 10474
Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm

Re: The Paranoid Style

Post by Douglas Mercer » Sun Jan 12, 2025 4:30 pm

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Douglas Mercer
Posts: 10474
Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm

Re: The Paranoid Style

Post by Douglas Mercer » Sun Jan 12, 2025 4:31 pm

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Douglas Mercer
Posts: 10474
Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm

Re: The Paranoid Style

Post by Douglas Mercer » Sun Jan 12, 2025 4:31 pm

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Douglas Mercer
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Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm

Re: The Paranoid Style

Post by Douglas Mercer » Sun Jan 12, 2025 4:32 pm

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Douglas Mercer
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Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm

Re: The Paranoid Style

Post by Douglas Mercer » Sun Jan 12, 2025 4:33 pm

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