>Do you feel the anti-Communists of the 50s were engaged in a cynical
>manipulation of public opinion? Did they concoct the Red Menace as a PR
>campaign? Or did they believe their own psycho-babble? Were they selling
>the American people on something they knew to be fraudulent, or did they
>feel genuinely threatened, as if by an invasion of alien space pods?
The ruling class was certainly threatened. It wasn't a paranoid fantasy, though there were plenty of fantastic paranoid moments involved.
Doug