From 2018. On the various coalitions of nutters Donbass has inspired.

By Aaron Lake Smith Harpers Magazine

Birtherism and 9/11 Truth, it turned out, were merely the prelude to the apotheosis of American paranoia. Global conspiratorial thinking now touches all our lives. On the right, schizo-fantasies such as Pizzagate, false-flag operations and crisis actors, George Soros as puppet master, and Holocaust-denialism have achieved maximum penetration. On the other end, liberals driven insane by Donald Trump have embraced the Serial-like amateur-investigator thrills provided by the daily drip-hope of Russian collusion—a reliable endorphin shot for an otherwise powerless and alienated opposition party, trapped in the spectacle of palace intrigue. Turn on cable news and you can see all manner of wild speculations presented as fact—fifty minutes of centrist think-tank experts and Deep State stans riffing on Melania’s “disappearance,” the secret messages that could be contained within Putin’s World Cup soccer ball—the whole effort laden with a desperate undercurrent of, We’re one step from impeachment. As these theories grow more complex, the Overton window shifts and the public atomizes even further, scrambling traditional left and right political affiliations.

READ MORE