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" Almost immediately after World War II, our most important ally, the Soviet Union, became our most serious adversary-cum-enemy. For Americans in 1950, it was not delusional to worry about international Communist aggression or Soviet espionage in the United States. But that’s the problem with a conspiracist mindset. After some kernel of reality triggers exaggerated fears and a possible explanation, it grows into an imaginary labyrinth of all-powerful evil, an elaborate based-on-a-true-story fiction that passes for nonfiction, such as the fantasy that thousands of committed Communists were covertly using movies and TV shows to propagandize on behalf of Communism and the Soviet Union. Anti-Communism was realistic; McCarthyism was fantastical. "

Kurt Andersen , Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History


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Kurt Andersen quote : Almost immediately after World War II, our most important ally, the Soviet Union, became our most serious adversary-cum-enemy. For Americans in 1950, it was not delusional to worry about international Communist aggression or Soviet espionage in the United States. But that’s the problem with a conspiracist mindset. After some kernel of reality triggers exaggerated fears and a possible explanation, it grows into an imaginary labyrinth of all-powerful evil, an elaborate based-on-a-true-story fiction that passes for nonfiction, such as the fantasy that thousands of committed Communists were covertly using movies and TV shows to propagandize on behalf of Communism and the Soviet Union. Anti-Communism was realistic; McCarthyism was fantastical.