The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Dueling Paranoias

Posted on | July 17, 2024 | Comments Off on Dueling Paranoias

Have you ever given any thought to the question, “What causes paranoia?” Like, the pathogenesis of the disease? Because of my long interest in the field of psychology (“Crazy People Are Dangerous”), I have given a lot of thought to this subject and I consider it significant that stimulant drugs like methamphetamine and cocaine can cause paranoia. What do stimulants do? They artificially accelerate your brain, speed up your thinking process, and can help focus your mental attention. Paranoia is a common enough side effect of the abuse of these drugs as to offer a clue about the developmental path of psychotic paranoia among those who aren’t meth addicts or cocaine addicts.

“Boy, you think too much,” my oldest friend D.W. used to say, and it’s true. I have a vivid imagination and obsessive tendencies, as manifested by my habit of “going down a rabbit hole” of online research. Something else — like most paranoiacs, I often see connections that aren’t apparent to others. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with someone sliding off the edge of sanity, you’re familiar with this symptom of paranoia, the tendency to link up entirely coincidental events into an imaginary pattern of malice by the threatening “them.”

Maintaining mental health requires us to be cognizant of our own harmful mental patterns, and find ways to cope with the kind of stressful situations we encounter. So when I go down a rabbit hole of research, it’s important to do this in a self-aware manner, and not get myself sucked into a vortex of craziness. Which brings me to the topic of anti-Trump lunatic Dmitri Mehlhorn, who made headlines over the weekend by suggesting (in an email to “sympathetic journalists”) that Trump had “staged” the assassination attempt. Do you know how many hours I’ve spent researching this guy? Answer: Too many.

One of the things I unearthed in my research into Dmitri Mehlhorn is a memo “originally circulated by Investing in US to several dozen anti-Trump political activists in April 2020,” which could serve as Exhibit A in any court case seeking to prove that Mehlhorn has an incurable case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. It was with great difficulty that I resisted the urge to fisk the whole thing. However, I mention this not to prove Mehlhorn is a lunatic — no further proof is necessary — but rather as a preamble to explaining what set me off on that snipe hunt yesterday:

FBI, DHS warn of possible
retaliation for attack on Trump

Oh, dear God! Really? The feds think it’s a good idea to warn law enforcement about (hint, hint) “extremists” plotting “retaliation”? And then leak their memo to Politico? Yeah, that’s really going to soothe Republican fears about the “deep state.” Great thinking, guys!

And down the rabbit hole I went:

The FBI is allegedly the best investigative organization in the world and yet, we are told, they have been able to learn nothing at all about what could have motivated a 20-year-old geek to become an assassin.
Do you see why this apparent mystery might arouse suspicion among those who are already deeply distrustful of the FBI? . . .

You can read the rest of that at my Substack — to which, I hasten to add, I’ve recently added a paid-subscriber option, although so far I haven’t put anything behind the paywall, because I’m still learning how to use the platform and am taking it step-by-step for a while.



 

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Category: Conspiracy Theories

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