There’s an old meme that you’ve surely seen. To paraphrase, it holds that conspiracy nuts are really just six months ahead of everybody else.
Then there’s the other meme that asks if you’ve apologized to your conspiracy theorist friends for doubting them.
These days, we’re beginning to shed our assumptions that the comfortable, boring normal we grew up with, in which most cops and politicians were honest and we could trust our institutions to act in beneficent ways, would continue. Americans know that those assumptions don’t hold anymore, and we’re beginning to come to terms with the fact that we’re in decline as a country, and active measures — and real reforms — have to be engaged if we don’t want to see the end of our republic as we know it.
