Blinded on the Right-- and the Left

Mass psychology time: I'm starting to understand the selective vision on the right as a funhouse mirror of old leftists who smelled Hitler coming, but somehow couldn't recognize Stalin and Mao for what they were. A key anecdote from Ronald Perlstein's Invisible Bridge: “Reagan is on the radio [during the fall of Saigon], talking about the USS Midway rescuing widows and orphans on the high seas in Vietnam. And you can almost hear it and you can almost hear yourself say, ‘Oh. That’s what the USS Midway was doing in Southeast Asia in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It was rescuing widows and orphans.”