My grandmother died about 15 years ago. I won’t go on-and-on about what a saint she was, because that would be a lie. She was a sick, cruel, and small person… I am sure there was trauma and hardship that helped turn her into the miserable excuse for a human being that she became, but at some point you have to stop making excuses and just accept that- for whatever reasons- she was just no damn good.

In the decade or so preceding her death she developed a progressing dementia- no one deserves that fate, not her and especially not her devoted husband who struggled heroically to care for her. There is a tendency in popular portrayals of dementia to paint it as a gentle sad fading away of a person. That is a crock of shit- maybe that makes for a sweet and melancholy plot device and perhaps its how it goes in a few rare cases- but in general the process is brutal, ugly and vicious. In my grandmother’s case it distilled her down to all of her most negative emotions… fear, rage, paranoia- stripped away was any shred of rationality, any restraint she had exercised in the past was gone. She became randomly delusional, paranoid, violent. Convinced others were plotting against her…

The desire for inflicting cruelty was there, and not governed by any rational restraint- but thankfully there was no longer the cunning there that had made her so effective at it in the past…

I bring this up because more and more as I watch what is going on in the conservative movement I keep picturing her at her worst- when she was lucid enough to lash out but too far gone to be coherent in her rage… leaping from one paranoid nonsensical delusion to the next and back again in a disjointed lurching way that was impossible to follow.

Take the Q-anon nonsense for example- a large number of conservatives are convinced that liberal elites are engaged in ritualized child sex trafficking and cannibalism, that Trump is engaged in a stealth mission to end this and bring down the evil empire… rounding up the evil-doers and parading them through the streets- they are guided by breadcrumbs dropped by an anonymous poster on a conspiracy message board – vague Nostradamus like allusions to the plots going on in the shadows. The fact that these predictions are often shown to be wrong makes no difference to the true believers, they just reinterpret the erroneous prophecies so they are no longer in error.

The core tenet is that Mr. Trump, backed by the military, ran for office to save Americans from child-abusing devil-worshipers in the government and media. Backing the president’s enemies, the theory falsely claims, are prominent Democrats who extract hormones from children’s blood.
The theory spins off from there. In some versions, John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, is alive and hiding in rural Pennsylvania, biding his time until he re-emerges to back Mr. Trump’s re-election bid. Other iterations feature celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres and religious figures, including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama. U.F.O.s sometime make appearances, as does the 9/11 “truther” movement and anti-vaccine beliefs.

These delusions may be held by a minority of conservatives, but they have become a major pillar of the conservative platform. Q-anon candidates will be going to congress next year, congressional republicans avoid speaking out against it, or even pay it lip service. The president actively encourages it.

Delusions detached from reality are finding purchase in the halls of government- but only on one side of the aisle. The republican party is not just detached from reality, it has declared war on it. Facts, reason, and science have become the enemy. Any paranoid conspiracy theory is acceptable no matter how insane- all that matters is that it portrays the conservatives as noble warriors, and justifies their rage and cruelty.

They tell themselves ludicrous stories about how they are fighting against unspeakable evil, steeling themselves to commit atrocities in the mission to vanquish that evil.

They are too far gone to be reasoned with- they will continue lashing out, inflicting cruelty on the defenseless in order to feel the thrill of it- they will continue gibbering madness and paranoid delusions – our only hope is that they can be removed from positions of power and responsibility- put somewhere safe where they cannot do too much damage.