Posted 6:49 PM by Scoobie Davis

Isn't That Ironic, Don't You Think?
Kudos to Maureen Farrell for her edifying article on conspiracies on Buzzflash. What I found most ironic in the article was how Daniel Pipes, author of Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From was once head of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, which receives funding by my second favorite paranoid conspiracy theorist Richard Mellon Scaife (Jack Chick is numero uno). This is especially interesting to me because Scaife reminds me of the late Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, who was one of the main targets of historian Richard Hofstadter who coined the phrase "paranoid style" back in the 1960's. Sadly, while the American right of the 1960's, headed by William F. Buckley, repudiated Welch for his paranoid extremism, the contemporary right has embraced Scaife (and his money). What a pity.