Trump and his Boss
The right in America is home to a number of paranoid conspiracy theories, as the mainstream media are quick to point out. My favorite is that the world is secretly run by flesh-eating green space lizards disguised as humans, although I am not sure if that qualifies as a rightist conspiracy theory. (It might explain Donald Trump; the lizards didn’t quite get human color and hair right.)
But the soi-disant “rational,” “science-based” left is also a Petri dish for breeding paranoid conspiracy theories. However such theories, or at least their theorists, are generally given a pass, on the general principle of no enemies to the Left.
Pamela Newkirk gives a favorable review in the Washington Post to White Rage by Carol Anderson, a professor of African American history at Emory University. Anderson documents undoubted cases of oppression of blacks, but then starts seeing mysterious shadows.
Her most explosive allegation is that at a time when marijuana use was down, and cocaine, heroin and hallucinogen use was declining or leveling off, Reagan’s National Security Council and CIA “manufactured and facilitated” a drug crisis and were complicit in flooding African American communities with crack. She says the administration’s shielding of Colombian drug traffickers “actively allowed cocaine imports to the United States to skyrocket 50 percent within three years. . . . Soon crack was everywhere, kicking the legs out from under black neighborhoods,” she writes.
“The Reagan administration’s protection of drug traffickers escalated further when the CIA received approval from the Department of Justice in 1982 to remain silent about any key agency ‘assets’ that were involved in the manufacturing, transportation, or sale of narcotics,” she adds.
I see, the Federal government, presumably under both Republican and Democratic administration, has been aiding and abetting the sale of drugs to African Americans. This is what everyone else calls the War on Drugs and which many criticize for its uselessness.
The New York Time’s review fails to mention this interesting part of Anderson’s thesis.
I remember Cynthia McKinney, Democratic black women Representative who after 9-11 claimed that Bush had deliberately facilitated the whole affair. As Wikipedia summarizes:
McKinney gained national attention for remarks she made following the 2001 US attacks, charging that the United States had advance knowledge of the attacks and that George W. Bush may have been aware of the incipient attack and allowed them to happen, allegedly due to his father’s business interests: “It is known that President Bush’s father, through The Carlyle Group, had–at the time of the attacks–joint business interests with the bin Laden construction company and many defense industry holdings, the stocks of which have soared since September 11.”
But of course, this is not an evidence of paranoia, because as is well known everything blacks claim must be true, or at least must not be contradicted, because they have a privileged position as The Oppressed.
Political correctness trumps rationality for the Left.
PS McKinney is palsy with “David Icke, a man best known for believing that the world is run by a secret cabal of shapeshifting reptilian aliens.”
