On the left, construed broadly, we’re worried about things like the constitutional order. Meanwhile, on the right, well, there’s this (boldface mine):

Take the recent flare-up on the right over the online activity of Thomas Crooks, who attempted to kill Trump last year in Butler, Pennsylvania. Ever since the assassination attempt, Republicans have fumed over the FBI saying Crooks left behind only a slim online profile. That made it harder to blame Democrats or any kind of organized leftist network for the shooting. The frustration crested this past week as Tucker Carlson accused law enforcement agencies of systemically covering up, or outright lying to the public about, Crooks’s background.

The anger grew so intense that Kash Patel’s FBI launched a “rapid response” account on X, seemingly aimed in large part at rebutting Carlson. On X, Patel insisted the FBI took the investigation into Crooks seriously.

But as is often the case with conspiracists, a direct attack on a load-bearing belief is not necessarily going to convince proponents that the belief is wrong. On Benny Johnson’s show, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) argued that Crooks was likely “groomed” as part of some CIA mind-control experiment.

CIA mind control. Okey dokey. Don’t worry, it gets dumber:

On Friday, meanwhile, Carlson unveiled what he purported were copies of some of Crooks’s online profiles. The Carlson segment was soon echoed in follow-up reports by the New York Post and InfoWars personality Breanna Morello.

The reporting appears to be mostly nonsense. The Post, for example, makes much of Crooks having an account on the art social-network site DeviantArt to suggest he might have a “furry fetish,” in an attempt to link the assassination attempt to a broader belief in MAGA that crazed furries—people who dress up as animals—are out to kill Trump supporters. But even the Post concludes Crooks isn’t connected to any actual furry art. DeviantArt hosts all kinds of bad art, not just furries!

Complicating matters further, Megyn Kelly claimed Monday that the furry stuff was actually an FBI-planted distraction meant to obscure Carlson’s suggestions that the shooter was recruited by shadowy forces.

When the Republican Party loses power, I just don’t know what we do with this. This is absolutely bonkers, and when the loudest voices in the Republican firmament are this divorced from reality (‘It’s the furries wot done it guv!’), I just don’t know how we have a body politic at all. Because this isn’t a deranged ideology, like racism, it’s just a mass communicable psychotic break.