“One of the impressive things about paranoid literature,” Hofstadter observed in the 1960s in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, “is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows”—McCarthy’s ninety-six-page pamphlet had 313 footnote references, and the John Birch Society founder’s attack on President Eisenhower had a hundred pages of notes. With the Web, this concern for pseudofactuality could be more elaborately expressed than ever.
