When I was in my early teens, I often dealt with bouts of insomnia. My options were either to turn to one of the many sci-fi paperbacks and dusty hardcovers in my parents’ library as I tried fruitlessly to summon sleep, or to secretly play Pokemon under lamplight.

Since rest was hard to come by, I’d sometimes even resort to listening to AM radio, primarily the gonzo conspiratorial stylings of “Coast-to-Coast AM” hosts George Noory and Art Bell. I’ve proudly worn a tinfoil hat ever since I first got caught up in Coast to Coast’s discussions of high strangeness and skullduggery woven into the fabric of the American experience, and I am far from the only one.

Despite what some Twitter users would have you believe, the term conspiracy theory has been with us long before Kennedy was assassinated, and was not coined by the CIA to discredit criticisms of the Warren Report. Some studies cite its use as far back as 1881 in reports following the shooting of President James A. Garfield. The term can’t shake its association with presidential assassinations it seems.

That said, many people in our country today are unabashed conspiracy theorists, though not all would ever admit it. It’s all about framing you see. Conspiracy theorizing has escalated from a niche hobby for the terminally bored, lonely, and mentally ill, into the standard way that many people think about the world and process current events.

This trend was identified by the philosopher Karl Popper and discussed in his 1945 book “The Open Society and its Enemies,” when an increasing number of people were buying into the idea that major world events were the “result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups.” Popper, of course was criticizing conspiratorial thinking, reacting in part to the atrocities of the Holocaust and the rise of fascism in Europe. Popper’s alternative “Open Society” would be a transparent and technocratic state that would ideally make such superstitions and speculations unnecessary.

Despite a great many of his intellectual descendants, like billionaire George Soros, spreading the influence of his ideology out into the world, their efforts have done little to bring about Popper’s utopia. In fact, Soros’ efforts in particular have done little to disabuse any conspiracy theorist of the notion that there’s something more to what’s going on in the world than what the TV talking head is telling them.

There isn’t much that separates your average Q-Anon believer holding out hope for JFK Jr to rise again from one of those people still desperately waiting for Robert Muller to confirm Donald Trump is a Russian Manchurian candidate with a pee fetish. The key difference between these two ends of the proverbial political horseshoe is the degree to which they held purchase in the American mind.

Keep in mind one of them is clearly coo-coo bananas and believed only by those detached from reality, while the other has been propped up and paraded around for years despite endless investigations coming up with nothing to legitimize it. The legacy media and the permanent managerial class banged the drum loudly, mongering fears that our nation had been tricked and duped resulting in the denial of the sainted Hillary Clinton.

The idea that the impressions created by Russian Facebook memes constituted a direct threat to our democracy was hogwash to begin with, but nonetheless it was carried forward as gospel to rationalize every line of inquiry and resistance. For Clinton’s cheerleaders in the media and bureaucracy of Washington, it was always easier to just believe that it was the voters who were wrong or worst deceived. But of course, it was the other way around.

A recent study from New York University reported heretical results that found this Russian twitter campaign had little sway or influence over the voters in 2016, something even outlets like the Washington Post conceded. Although I doubt, we will ever see the Post or the New York Times return their Pulitzer’s prizes won for their breathless incurious coverage of it anytime soon.

These groups turned on a “faucet of lies” and have only cranked up the pressure, despite the derangement it introduced into the populace and civil discourse. Journalist Matt Taibbi has called the entire Russian Collusion narrative, “the biggest hoax” thrown at the American people since the WMD lie embroiled us even deeper into the War on Terror. With this lie, they are able to rationalize every action they’ve taken to ensure their preferred candidate would never lose again. How very democratic of them.

These institutions blatantly distorted the national conversation and misled the public on any number of issues from the Russia Hoax, the state of the Southern Border, to COVID, to Hunter Biden’s laptop. They spent 4 years attacking the legitimacy of one election, and the last two impugning and eradicating any inquiry into the results from 2020.

If the petulant rage of Trump voters on Jan. 6, 2021, can be called an “insurrection,” then what do we call this? To say there wasn’t a conspiracy at work here is like saying Antifa isn’t actually a political organization simply because they don’t keep minutes and hold scheduled meetings advertised to the public.

There’s an old clip of comedian George Carlin appearing on Bill Maher’s old show “Politically Incorrect,” in which he debated a critic of conspiracy theories. Carlin points out that while a majority of the allegations made by such people are nebulous, they nonetheless shine a light on some definite truths about the connections and conflicts of interest that govern our world. As a youthful Maher looked on, Carlin said, “You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. They don’t need to call a meeting. They know what’s good for them.”

“They” certainly do George. They’ve weaponized the government and private corporations to police speech, and spread propaganda through every influencer, outlet, and platform that they could capture.

If allowed to continue on this path, the partisans in our government will quickly find every reason to escalate its weaponization beyond the “visibility filtering” they’ve been pushing on contrarians online. The saying goes that some conspiracy theories graduate to conspiracy facts once the tinfoil is on the other head as it were. I’ll be keeping my tinfoil on. You never know who might be listening.