This paper focuses on the theoretical purchase of “paranoia” in analyzing the Turkish state and its persecution anxieties. Departing from its colloquial uses, I mobilize “paranoia” as a psychoanalytic category to examine the recurrent authority crisis of the Turkish state since its foundation which simultaneously produces and castrates the nation’s “fathers.” Why did Mustafa Kemal never have a biological child? What happened to his adoptees? Did Turgut Ozal really have a heart attack or was the first Kurdish president of Turkey killed by the “deep” state? Has the son of Turgut Ozal afflicted by persecution delusions about his father? Does Recep T. Erdogan have a secret terminal illness that makes him falter when he gives public speech? Why have both of his sons wiped out of politics? These rumors circulate time and again on mainstream and social media at the moments of political crisis. The previous literature has examined the relationship between political leaders and their supporters through the lens of desire for a father in the symbolic order. This paper expands on this literature by focusing on the rumors that surface on traditional and social media outlets. It asks how the sovereign authority these “fathers” assume in the symbolic order is undermined by anxieties originating in the real and fantasies produced in the imaginary register. If the fiction of nationalism draws on kinship ideologies, this paper examines the plots that undermine the Turkish nationalist fiction. The aim is to explore the slippery ground on which national sovereignty moves in the ostensibly secular politics. I use the term “secular” in a limited way to imply that the nation’s fathers do not derive their authority from a transcendental force. But what is the source of their authority? What fills the lack left by the evacuation of God from politics since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire? What if we read the first one hundred years of the Turkish state through the lens of an unfillable gap that mass produces enemies to cover what it lacks — legitimacy.