A LITTLE MORE FROM THAT STACY MCCAIN PIECE I LINKED EARLIER:

What we are actually confronting is the boomerang effect of political paranoia. Democrats began flinging around this weapon during the Clinton years, when Hillary claimed that her husband’s sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky was actually a plot by a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” The American Spectator played an instrumental role in that saga and was subsequently targeted by the IRS. Just a coincidence, I’m sure. Democratic paranoia further escalated after the 2000 election recount fiasco in Florida, and many Democrats also claimed that George W. Bush somehow defrauded John Kerry in the 2004 election.

Over the years, Democrats used a series of demonized bogeymen to inspire fear and loathing among their grassroots “base.” During the Clinton presidency, the chief bogeymen were the Religious Right and Richard Mellon Scaife. Once Bush was elected, liberals decided chose as their new bogeymen White House adviser Karl Rove and war-mongering “neonconservatives,” the latter term being a liberal code word for Jews. Any researcher concerned about anti-Semitism in America would do well to examine how leftists exploited the “neoconservative” conspiracy theory to demonize Jewish Republicans during the Bush era. What’s remarkable is how swiftly Democrats can switch targets, choosing a new bogeyman to replace the old one almost instantaneously. A few months into the Bush administration, the much-demonized Scaife was utterly forgotten, and the Bible-thumpers of the Religious Right faded into the background, while liberals ranted on cable TV about those treacherous neocons!

Now, 12 years after the end of the Bush era, this seems like ancient history, but the point is that Democrats must always have a right-wing enemy with which to frighten their grassroots constituency. During the Obama years, the enemy was first Sarah Palin — remember when Joe McGinniss moved in next door to her place in Wasilla? — and then it was Andrew Breitbart for a while. By 2010, however, Democrats and their media allies had decided that the Tea Party was the real enemy, which in turn led to the Koch brothers becoming the scary bogeymen. Charles and David Koch had long supported libertarian causes, without provoking any great controversy, until their sponsorship of the Tea Party movement made them a Dangerous Extremist Menace.

In November 2011, I saw first-hand consequences of the Left’s demonization of the Koch brothers, when a mob of “Occupy” protesters stormed a D.C. event hosted by Americans for Prosperity where one of the Koch brothers was in attendance. Another reporter and I found ourselves trapped between the mob and the glass front doors of the building, with one D.C. cop to protect us from hundreds of angry “Occupy” maniacs (see “The Mob Who Came to Dinner,” Nov. 7, 2011). Trust me when I say, no Democrat in Congress had more reason to fear the unruly mob of Trump supporters at the Capitol than we had to fear that screaming scrum of deranged “Occupy” protesters in 2011.

All that Democrats and their allies have done over the years to foster a climate of hatred and paranoia in America has conveniently been forgotten by the media in the two months since the last election. We are not supposed to compare the riot at the Capitol two weeks ago to the riots that wrecked several major U.S. cities last summer. The media worked overtime to convince Americans that George Floyd’s fentanyl overdose was a “murder” by racist police. Anyone who doubted that narrative was labeled a “white supremacist” — facts are now hate, according to our media overlords — and this same label has since been used to smear all Trump supporters as complicit in what CNN viewers are told was a right-wing terrorist attack on the Capitol. More than 100 participants in that riot are now facing federal charges, and at least one Trump supporter has committed suicide after he was “doxed” by left-wing activists trying to get him fired from his job as a bank executive.

Read the whole thing.