Since the end of World War II, a fair number of Americans have lined up to take their place in the private pews of a new faith governed by the Church of the Conspiracy Theory. Its high priests — and this president is among them — dispute all science while suggesting “leftist” media exists to disseminate falsehoods. This belief system has expanded a thousandfold since the dawn of the online world and social media. When the president struck down what he called a “green scam,” he was doing no more than preaching to his choir. That ardent choir tends to believe that a plot was behind the murder of JFK, that the moon landing was faked and the Earth is flat, that COVID was manufactured, and that all vaccines and medical breakthroughs are mind-control schemes and a public menace. Racism is a fiction to disrupt White America, and the first Black president, no evidence needed, is not who he says he is. Perhaps even the surgeon general may have lied about the risks of smoking to snuff out the tobacco industry, just as the Black president (and Joe Biden after him) may have lied about climate change to undermine the lagging American auto industry. Again, facts are irrelevant because the passion of the true conspiracy theorist operates on a truer and higher plane. What John Kerry has called “Orwellian governance” is gospel truth to this latest flock. All of which makes this America a theocracy of a sort, a western kind of techno-Taliban minus the beards. So it is that years of enlightened conclusions have become contaminated by conspiratorial thinking — an industry in its own right — in much the same way Joe McCarthy (and Richard Nixon) imagined a contaminated America filled with communists. It’s an old dog with a new collar, and it snarls.