The right does not have a monopoly on paranoia, as the conspiratorial fantasies of the backers of Julian Assange show … Julian Assange last week breached his bail conditions after seeking refuge at the Ecuadorean embassy in London … In his superb essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter took care not to tie paranoia to a particular ideology. He was writing after the red scare of McCarthyism had driven thousands of allegedly "subversive" Americans from their jobs. In that cold climate, it felt natural to investigate conservative-led outbreaks of hysteria. Throughout American history, rightwing movements had raged against masonic, Catholics and Jewish conspiracies. In Hofstadter's day, they had led demented campaigns against gun control and fluoride in the water supply. If Hofstadter were alive today, he would doubtless write about the birther movement, or cast a scornful eye at the gibbering career of Glenn Beck, formerly of Fox News, who has all the traditional anxieties about secret societies and Jews. – The Observer

Dominant Social Theme: Where do these paranoid ideas come from?

Free-Market Analysis: Nick Cohen over at the leftist UK Observer is declaiming against political paranoia. The putative target is Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame but the dissertation is far wider than that and basically damns paranoia generally as a response to what is taking place in the world.

Cohen's article is launched against Julian Assange, a doubtful target at best. The larger question is how canny observers of the socio-political scene such as Cohen can have any doubt at this point that there does exist a conspiracy to create global government and that it has become increasingly active and obvious in the past decade or so.

Of course, the answer that occurs to us is that Cohen is hewing to a particular orthodoxy based on the publication for which he is writing. The Observer is a sister publication to the UK Guardian, which is the newspaper of record for British leftist orthodoxy.

While the mainstream left generally has no trouble with floating conspiratorial theories about the private sector, the larger paranoia aimed at a conflation between government and private enterprises called mercantilism escapes it.

Perhaps this is because a large-scale conspiracy is one that inevitably involves government facilities, and left-wingers are most resistant to the idea that government can be utilized within this context. Government for such people is always the solution, not the problem.

Within this context, Cohen's screed is only notable because it focuses on Assange, who is generally seen as an ally by the formal left. Launching an attack on Assange from a left-wing perch would seem to be a fairly rare occurrence, especially given that he is now seeking asylum from a socialist administration in Ecuador. It just goes to show how muddled alliances are becoming in the 21st century.

Outside of the focus on Assange, Cohen's editorial is fairly standard and could have been written anytime in the past 50 to 100 years. But that brings up the larger question of how people can ignore the evolution of the one-world conspiracy even at this late date.

The events of the past decade – clearly showing a justification for a certain perspective regarding The Way the World Works – are simply ignored except when they provide fodder to justify the author's argument. It's almost a tour de force of willful ignorance. Here's some more:

Although Hoftstadter investigated the manias of conservatives, he refused to call them conservative manias. Rather than use the language of right and left he explained that he preferred to talk of the paranoid style, "simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind." …

Reasonable doubt cannot stay the tongues of Ken Loach, Tariq Ali, Jemima Khan, Naomi Wolf, John Pilger and their comrades. They lament western wickedness with the reliability of professional mourners. For them, America is a demonic empire with supernatural power and reach. The constraints that bind ordinary nations cannot contain it.

I refuse to call their conspiracy theories "leftwing," and not only because most of the British liberal left behaved honourably during the WikiLeaks affair. Hofstadter's caution needs to be remembered too – paranoia turns everything it touches to dirt …

In 1964, Hofstadter noted the tendency for the paranoid to emulate the enemy they claim to oppose. His words read as well today: "It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him."

Leaving aside our suspicions that Assange himself is something of a manipulated entity, along with WikiLeaks, it's difficult to fathom how anyone in this day and age can continue to present the idea that "paranoia" about the powers-that-be is misplaced.

What is it about 150 central banks all spewing money-from-nothing that such worshippers of rationality do not understand? John Maynard Keynes and David Rockefeller virtually oversaw the creation of the modern globalist state. We are to believe this is simply coincidence?

Today, the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Health Organization, International Criminal Court, European Union and numerous other globalist and quasi-globalist facilities wield more and more power. Someone put those building blocks in place. Someone operates and coordinates them.

It would be different if these elements had emerged on their own but they haven't. They've been deliberately created and empowered by a handful of individuals. What we call the Internet Reformation makes it easy to trace the patterns and identify the sources.

It is not at all difficult. In fact, it is so simple that one can argue those who refuse to see are in some sense participating in an elite dominant social theme – a promotion of a particular kind designed to advance world government – which is the evident and obvious goal of the power elite.

The idea is always to deny, deny, deny until it is too late. World government – a terrible idea – is to be built in secrecy and expanded by subterfuge. At every turn, those behind it deny its presence even as more and more of it is exhumed and examined via electronic technology.

Those dedicated to world government continue to advance the idea that there is no active conspiracy to create it. That they do so at this late date only reveals to us how incapable they are of dealing with the technology that has exposed their manipulations and continues to do so.