The Balloon

[Belacqua]

It shouldn't have been too much of a revelation that a lot of Americans are paranoid about the PRC.  For fuck's sake, there's a good-sized proportion of the population that can only bring themselves to give a shit about COVID when they're reminded it was first found in China.

This is from The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter:

Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War. Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.

I would add that it's not just the right wing any more.