I have nothing to say about the anti-Obama, anti-immigrant, persecuted-Christian attitudes, since I don’t hold those myself, and I pretty much dismiss them as the product of paranoid wackos when I hear them.
However, I do want to address two of your other observations.
Disaster Preparedness
While there are certainly wackjobs out there, in general, you seem to be confusing a desire to be prepared for a disaster or criminal attack if one should occur, with the expectation that one is going to occur at any moment. I don’t see anything irrational with wanting to be able to defend yourself from a criminal, as opposed to cowering somewhere waiting for the police to show up if a crime does occur . Being prepared to do so if necessary does not mean you expect it to occur, any more so than having a fire extinguisher means you expect your computer to burst into flames. But both of these are risks, and I don’t understand what you characterize as “psychotic paranoia” about wanting to be prepared to help yourself in these contingencies, rather than wait for the government to show up and save the day.
Similarly, many conservatives do not want to bet their life and property that the government will always have the resources and ability to save them, in the event of a natural disaster, or economic collapse. Look at what happened in Hurricane Katrina, and look at what we came very close to back in 2008. The total collapse of the worldwide banking system might have resulted in a breakdown in modern society, a shortage of oil, no transportation available to bring in food, etc. You may think this sounds outrageous, extreme, and unlikely - and it is, but unlikely does not mean impossible.
Many people don’t realize the complexity of the world we have today, in which we eat fresh vegetables shipped in from Argentina, consume oil brought from Saudi Arabia, and pay our police with money borrowed from investors in Asia, and people assume that this complex network will always exist to serve and protect them. Other people hope it will, but they look at the lessons of history, and prefer to be prepared if it one day breaks down. No society in history has lasted forever, even though many of them probably thought they would. Maybe modern society is special, but, maybe it is not.
You may prefer to just pretend that nothing bad will ever happen. Disasters like this are certainly not obviously imminent, but to claim that they are impossible, or that you know for certain just how unlikely they are, is ludicrous.
The same goes for “defense of tyranny”. Who knows what will happen in the future? I certainly don’t. We seem to be doing just fine now and I am not remotely concerned about tyranny. Over the course of my lifetime, who knows? WWI and WWII occurred in Europe over the course of what, 30 years?
There are vast numbers of lazy people looking to sponge off of my hard work.
Yes, well - there are. And there are politicians who are willing to award these people a fraction of the product of my work in exchange for their vote.
I worry about a society in which people who have nothing to contribute to society are allowed to vote for what society must give them. And I worry about a society in which politicians argue that dependency on government is acceptable, and use the government’s ability to take money from its citizens by force to buy themselves votes, more directly and more blatantly than any wealthy businessman ever has. I am not saying we are at this point already. But I am concerned we are moving in that direction.
I don’t think this worry is irrational.
Similarly, I also worry about a society in which wealthy and powerful interests have utilized their power over government to corrupt the system enough that the promise of “work hard and you will do well in America” no longer holds true. But that’s not one of your little “psycho conservative” tropes now is it?
