Just too stupid and paranoid to engage with

I see the latest polemic sweetheart over at Catallaxy is Tucker Carlson - they swoon over his editorials which are encouraging the paranoid view of the Left (with barely concealed racism) at a close to McCarthy-ite level.

In fact, I had cause recently to look again at the famous 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" and it quotes Joe McCarthy talking in 1951:

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. . . . What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence.

And let's compare that to a post by crackpot wannabe historian CL at Catallaxy today, wherein he compares efforts to remove Thomas Beckett's name from some manuscript:

I know. Comparing Donald Trump to St Thomas Becket might be a stretch comparable to that asked of one of the portly President’s Mar-a-Lago polos but the parallel that interests me is Henry II’s quartet of assassins and Barack Obama’s equally say-no-more-savvy knights. “Make sure you look over things and have the right people on it.” They knew what he meant. It was remarkable enough that a pandemic came along to cover up the biggest political scandal in US history. The Russia Hoax is now even more hazy following a nationwide race war incited by the media on behalf of the Democrats. Will the swordsmen get away with it? Ignore the distractions – riots and virus – because that is still the real test of whether the United States goes on as originally constituted.

Actually, defending Joe McCarthy is another favourite past time at Catallaxy.  Steve Kates had a whole post about that recently, but CL has done it too.  

 As with all of the Trump endorsing Right, they prefer to believe luminaries such as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and a bunch of self serving Republican politicians over the actual multiple intelligence services knowledge that Russia did interfere in the last election, and the public knowledge that Trump and his minions were rushing to them hoping to get their help.  

Interestingly, I don't think I have seen a single reference at Catallaxy to the intelligence services reporting that they believe Putin's minions are paying Afghanis to kill US troops.   If it's Russia, and if it hurts Trump, they have no interest at all.

They are too dumb, and too far into the culture war conspiracy rabbit hole, to bother engaging with.  

Update:  over at NPR, some interesting bits by the author of a new biography of McCarthy:

His crusade was launched one night in February 1950, in an out-of-the-way community, Wheeling, W.Va., and Joe McCarthy was there to deliver the famous Republican speech on the night of Abraham Lincoln's birthday. ... Joe McCarthy went there that night with the briefcase that contained two speeches and he wasn't sure which one to give until the last minute. One was a snoozer of a speech on national housing policy, and had he delivered that speech that night, you and I wouldn't be here 70 years talking about him.

Instead, he pulled the other speech out of his briefcase and it was a barn burner on anti-communism and it was the speech that launched his crusade. ... I think it was a matter of opportunism when he started out this crusade. He was looking for any issue that would give him the limelight. He wasn't sure until the last second which issue that might be, only when he got the response that he did that night, which was within two days, every newspaper in America put Joe McCarthy and his charges of 205 spies in the State Department, they put those stories on Page 1. Joe McCarthy was off and running and he never turned back....

At the beginning McCarthy ... clearly didn't believe what he was saying. And he had fun with it, waving around the sheets, saying he had this list in his hand when he knew he didn't have a list in his hand. Calling up everybody from J. Edgar Hoover to friends in the media after he created this firestorm, saying, "You've got to help me come up with some evidence to prove the things that I've said." He was the cynic. He was an opportunist, and he knew that he was embellishing, if not outright lying. But by the end, I am convinced that Joe McCarthy actually believed his own rhetoric. If you say often enough that there are spies in the State Department or that refugees coming across the border are ruining America, if you say it often enough, you might actually begin to believe it. And I'm convinced by the end Joe McCarthy was a true believer in his own opportunistically created cause.

Yeah, someone really deserving of being a Right wing hero...