Four years ago, Melanie Phillips wrote an article about conspiracy theorists:
despite the fact that we imagine we are living in the most enlightened and rational society in the most enlightened and rational age known to mankind, a startling proportion of us appear to have taken leave of our senses.
[…]
We are living through a flight from reason itself, a kind of collective paranoia.
I have some sympathy with that view.
Two years ago Melanie Phillips wrote this:
A particularly ripe example of the ‘global Zionist conspiracy’ libel has now surfaced in a 83-page screed by two professors — Stephen Walt, the academic dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, no less, and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago — and published across 14 pages in the London Review of Books (of course). 14 pages! 83 pages!
I have some sympathy with the widespread criticism of Mearsheimer and Walt.
But has Melanie Phillips has become the very thing she professes to loathe? Paranoia about the Islamisation of the UK, denialism about climate science, and whining about totalitarian atheists?
Of course, one man’s views that something is a conspiracy theory can be of another man’s immutable truth, but stuff like this is surely straight out the same cauldron of paranoia that swirls around the more deranged Bushitler crew we have had to put up with for the past 8 years?
Barack Obama appears to sit on a nexus between Marxist revolutionary activists, unreprentant [sic] former terrorists, Black Power racists, Chicago mobsters – oh, and a Saudi who is trying to buy up America. If you were to turn up at US immigration control with a background of such associates, it’s a fair bet they wouldn’t let you off the air-bridge. Yet this man may well become President of the US!
I’m not sure where this exactly sits on the 911 conspiracy/Lady Diana/ZOG government/grassy knoll/Area 51 conspiracy spectrum, but it appears to have left the realms of normal political debate far, far, behind.