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We are locked in a cage match with ghosts, hallucinations, imaginary demons, and a very specific, very aggressive form of collective psychosis.

The era of the sane political disagreement is in the rearview mirror, and it's currently being devoured by a pack of feral conspiracy theories that have moved from the damp, mildewy basements of 4chan directly into the West Wing and the halls of Congress.

We've moved past the "fringe." There is no fringe anymore. The fringe is the fabric.

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If you'd told me ten years ago that a significant portion of the GOP, the party I spent decades building, for better or (mostly) worse, would believe that the world is run by a child-abusing cabal of subterranean lizard people who operate out of a pizza parlor, I would have told you to lay off the peyote. If you'd told me that once Donald Trump's name appeared in the case, that 90% of them would declare their own deeply held previous beliefs as a hoax, I would have taken the peyote.

But here we are. Conspiratorial thinking is no longer a bug in the system; it is the operating system itself. It's the "Big Lie" of the 2020 election on steroids, washed down with a gallon of anti-vax snake oil and a side of "Deep State" paranoia.

Why? Because conspiracy theories are the ultimate political comfort food.

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They take a complex, terrifying, and often random world and turn it into a binary morality play. They tell the guy whose factory closed down and whose kids don't call him anymore that it isn't because of automation or his own shitty personality; it's because of Them. The Globalists. The immigrants. The Elites. The shadowy figures pulling the strings.

It's seductive. It's addictive. And it is rotting the American brain (both the right and left hemispheres) from the inside out.

Let's talk about the mechanics, because there's always a dollar sign attached to the delusion. The people peddling this garbage, the podcasters selling survival food, the Sinclair, CBS, and OANN "news" anchors who look like they were carved out of ham, and the orange-tinted deity himself, know exactly what they're doing.

They aren't true believers. They're carnies.