Hand it to Ann Coulter and Donald Trump: They know how to send the left into an apoplectic conniption.  Coulter’s contribution to the left’s unhinged tantrum is her book on immigration, ¡Adios America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole.  Coulter has gone “full racist,” we are told, because she had the temerity to suggest that the GOP try to get more white votes and abandon the quixotic crusade to persuade Hispanics to vote Republican.  Trump merely observed that among the Mexican illegals who jump the border are myriad vagabonds, thieves, murderers, and rapists.  Mother Jones tagged Donald Trump a “huge racist” for these utterances against our open border, and we are told that “Hispanics” will run from the GOP if it tolerates the likes of Trump and Coulter.

Trump has refused to apologize.  So has Coulter.  And that infuriates the left even more.

The hysterical reactions to Trump and Coulter are just two examples of the left’s attempt to paint any opposition to its pro-abortion, pro-sodomy, anti-Christian agenda as a manifestation of “extremism” and “hate.”  The pioneer in the business is the Southern Poverty Law Center.  But the modern left, via such web-based publications as Salon and Daily Kos, has refined and intensified the SPLC’s methods of smearing by innuendo, imprecation, and guilt by association.

Writing for Harper’s in 1964, Richard Hofstadter called this the “paranoid style of American politics.”  At the time he placed the paranoiacs among the conservatives, not least the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy.  Today, the paranoiacs reside on the left almost exclusively, notwithstanding the strange phenomenon of Alex Jones and his Prison Planet.  The left thinks we live on a prison planet, too, except that the prisoners are blacks, women, homosexuals, and Third World immigrants, and the prison wardens are white men.

Wrote Hofstadter,

no other word [than paranoid] adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy. . . . Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be. . . . The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

The run-up to last November’s election was typical of American politics over the last 15 years or so.  In the final two weeks, ad campaigns against Republicans told black voters that a GOP victory would mean American streets running red with black blood.  “Children” like Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, the ad said, would be shot dead.  A campaign flier in Georgia showed two black kids holding signs that said “Don’t Shoot,” warning of “another Ferguson.”  Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) told NBC’s Chuck Todd that Southerners who didn’t vote for her or support President Obama were sexists and racists.  Republicans were also waging a “war on women.”  Such was former Colorado Democratic Sen. Mark Udall’s obsession with abortion and birth control that the media dubbed him “Sen. Uterus,” and the leftist Denver Post endorsed his Republican opponent, Cory Gardner.

It doesn’t take a big news event such as an election, Coulter’s book, or Trump’s remarks, however, to invite a hurricane of crazy commentary from the left.  The headlines that blare from Daily Kos, Salon, and Slate are loaded with Hofstadterian lingo.  White dudes are “whiny.”  Conservatism has a “racist problem.”  “Right-wing policies are literally killing women.”  A “white guy killer syndrome” stalks the land, and America must “admit what it’s long resisted: White male privilege kills.”  “White people are more racist than they realize,” conservatives are “casually racist,” and there’s this thing called “hideous white hypocrisy.”  “White America must answer” for the awful church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina.

When the left doesn’t state flatly that someone is a racist, it uses other terms.  Moron, slimy, stupid, creepy, perverse, deadly, cretin, crazed, sexist, misogynist, and homophobe are just a few.  The drumbeat pounds the message home 24/7 year-round.

Consider the hysteria that greeted Rep. Paul Ryan’s observation that “inner cities” have a “real culture problem.”  Though Ryan carefully described the problem as “inner-city” culture, leftist websites went ballistic.  Ryan, they averred, is a racist, a claim so silly that even the leftist Mediaite.com called it “laughable.”  Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic said Ryan sounded like Barack Obama.

At the New York Times, leftist shill Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate in economics, joined the lynch mob riding after Ryan.  “Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate.  But it doesn’t matter.”  Why?  “Because American conservatism is . . . largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.”  Translation: Ryan might not be racist, but everyone who voted for him is.

This is what a leftist religion professor recently told the New York Times in an interview titled “Looking ‘White’ in the Face”:

White is not “neutral.”  “Pure” reason is lily white, as if white is not a color or is closest to the purity of the sun, and everything else is “colored.”  Purification is a name for terror and deportation, and “white” is a thick, dense, potent cultural signifier that is closely linked to rationalism and colonialism.  What is not white is not rational.  So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued—it affects what we mean by “reason”—and “we” white philosophers cannot ignore it.

What else constitutes “hate” or “extremism”?  To start, there’s opposing sodomy.  Opposing free contraception or the Obama Care mandate forcing the Catholic Church to provide employee health insurance covering contraceptive devices, including abortifacients, makes one an enemy soldier in the “war on women.”  Christianity is evil, and expressing orthodoxy verbally or in writing is “hate speech.”  Opposing ObamaCare is also racist.  That last came not from one of the moonbats at Daily Kos, but from U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV).  Opposing the left on anything invites a hailstorm of vitriolic animadversion.

Has this incessant drumbeat had any effect?

Consider Trump.  The Hispanic media giant Univision canceled the broadcast of Trump’s Miss USA pageant, NBC severed ties with him (he was the star of The Apprentice), and Macy’s no longer sells the Trump clothing line.  The Professional Golfers Association and Trump agreed that hosting the PGA Grand Slam of Golf at Trump’s National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes wasn’t a bright idea.

Then there’s Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and former chieftain of Mozilla, which produces the Firefox web browser.  In 2008, Eich donated $1,000 to the forces backing marriage via referendum in California.  Last year, the Lavender Mafia forced him out of his job as chief executive at Mozilla.  Eich, a bazillionaire, wasn’t hurt financially, of course, but the message was sent.  A columnist for The Nation noted that his homosexual friends wanted to run down the list of 6,500 supporters of the referendum, find those who gave as much as or more than Eich, and get them fired.

Don Surber, a columnist at the Charleston Daily Mail (WV), was fired for calling Michael Brown an “animal.”  He had to go, his boss wrote, because his remarks were “unfortunate, inflammatory and . . . indefensible.”  Bob Eschliman, an editor at the Newton Daily News in Iowa, lost his job because he wrote a piece denouncing the pro-homosexual Queen James Bible.  He also mentioned the “Gaystapo” on his blog.  Eschliman’s employer, Shaw Newspapers, fired him because such a sentiment is not one that “best represents our company and best serves the interests of our readers.”

In 2013, the Heritage Foundation got rid of analyst Jason Richwine, who holds a doctorate from Harvard, after Heritage published a piece that said a proposed amnesty bill in the U.S. Senate would cost the United States some $6.3 trillion during the next half-century.  Richwine’s crime?  His doctoral thesis stated that Hispanic immigrants have lower IQs than white Americans.

In 2012, MSNBC cashiered longtime analyst Pat Buchanan because his book Suicide of a Superpower suggested that permitting immigration to transform the United States into a nonwhite-majority country might not be such a bright idea.  When National Review’s John Derbyshire wrote about warning his children about black crime, National Review fired him.

White women are fair game for the hate hunt, too.  After Jennifer Graham, a columnist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, declared that Bruce Jenner cannot decide against the biological reality of sex, the antihate mob lit their torches.  “Caitlyn Jenner is still a mister,” Graham wrote.  For this, the advocates of tolerance wanted her fired.

Even leftists and blacks aren’t safe from the antihate posse.  Recall the smackdown of Alec Baldwin for directing “homophobic” comments at rude and pushy paparazzi, the scorn regularly heaped on the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen for telling the truth about black crime, and the firing of Kelvin Cochran, Atlanta’s black fire chief, for self-publishing a book with a few unkind words about homosexuals and other sexual deviants.

Newsweek recently reported that “America’s getting less white and that will save it,” although what it needs to be saved from isn’t quite clear.  Responding to Rep. Mo Brooks’s observation that the Democratic Party is making “war on whites,” the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank replied that such a war is a good thing.  “The United States is experiencing a rapid decoupling of race and nationality: Whiteness has less and less to do with being American,” Milbank wrote.

In a narrow political sense, this is bad news for the GOP, which is dominated by older white men such as Brooks.  But for the country, the disassociation of whiteness and American-ness is to be celebrated.  Indeed, it is the key to our survival.

What the hate-obsessed left never explains is why Milbank is permitted to write that “the disassociation of whiteness and American-ness is to be celebrated,” but Buchanan loses a gig for refusing to join the party.

So why the hatefest?  For one thing, it’s profitable, at least for the SPLC.  The SPLC has made hundreds of millions selling its lies about “hate groups.”  It has some $300 million in the bank.  But others don’t profit.  Salon, for example, has never made money.  Modern leftists do what they do for the cause.  Their purpose isn’t to make money, but to destroy what is left of Western Christian civilization by marginalizing, delegitimizing, and eventually disenfranchising those who created it.

The real target is the religious, cultural, and historic core of the United States, as well as her ancestral lands in Europe, which are not only white but Christian.  The left hates evangelicals or any other type of conservative Protestant.  And it loathes the Catholic Church with particular zeal, because She has refused to change Her teaching on the sexual matters with which the left is obsessed.  Europeans carried the Faith to the four corners of the world, oppressing “peoples of color” and erasing their “real religion” and culture.  Those crimes were bad enough, but now, even after the Sexual Revolution, the Catholic Church won’t ordain priestesses, or approbate abortion, birth control, extramarital sex, or same-sex “marriage.”  The Faith was and is an instrument of white, male, heterosexist oppression.  It must be destroyed.

No one and nothing is safe.  Even the lovable and innocent Thomas the Tank Engine, created by the late Anglican cleric Wilbert Awdry, is racist.  According to the lily white Tracy Van Slyke in the Guardian, the villains in the stories are the “dirty diesel engines. . . . The good engines pump out white smoke and the bad engines pump out black smoke. . . . [I]t’s not hard to make the leap into the race territory.”  Well, no, especially if one is a leftist nutjob.

“Paranoid style” may not even be the right words for claims such as Van Slyke’s.  However we characterize the left’s campaign, it is having its intended effect: to silence critics of the left’s policies with rhetorical terror that essentially criminalizes opposition.  That silence becomes tolerance, and finally acceptance of whatever, at the moment, the left is proposing, be it homosexual “marriage,” unfettered immigration, or the feminist rape-culture myth.