Paranoid, Delusional, Massochistic Fantasies

There’s a paranoid delusional state among wingnuts these days. It’s both frightening and amusing at once. Today I saw a bumper sticker on a pickup truck in St Louis:

I’ll keep my guns, my freedom, and my money.

You can keep the change.

One part of me wanted to find the owner of the truck and try desperately to provide him with a dose of reality. But I doubt it would have taken hold.

Some wingnuts have this fantasy that Obama and his minions are coming for your guns, with the ghosts of Mao Tse Tung and Lenin in tow. Despite legions of evidence that such a thing just won’t happen, they hold fast to this idea of the ATF knocking down their front door, killing their family, and taking their guns. They also hold fast to the laughable notion that an armed population can somehow hold the government in check…with its tanks, its planes, armed unmanned drones, cruise missiles, and vast treasure. Laughable. But somehow the fantasy lives…it’s almost like they want it to happen; they want to be martyrs for the cause.

The right has fed on paranoia and fear for the better part of a century now. They get some of their power from red scares, xenophobia, and myths resulting from paranoid fantasies. That’s ultimately self-destructive. Too bad they end up dragging the rest of the nation down with them.