The Three Great Premises of Idiot America: Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units; anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough, and fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

—Some Random Libtard With A Book Deal, 2006.

In 1983, allegations of child sexual abuse were raised against the employees of the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California. They were originally raised by a schizophrenic, alcoholic woman who also accused someone of raping her dog, and eventually killed herself. By the time the case finally ended, in a 1989 mistrial of the one remaining defendant, Ray Buckey, it had cost the taxpayers of California $15 million. Buckey had been in jail without bail for five years. His mother, grandmother, and sister, also defendants in the original indictments, were acquitted in the first trial, or had the charges against them dismissed. Nevertheless, they had their lives disrupted beyond measure.

The prime engines behind the case were quack psychology at the service of public hysteria and a revenue-hungry media. Children were testifying to all manner of fantastical tales: several said they'd seen animal sacrifices on the altar of a church; several talked about being flown to Palm Springs in a plane with no windows; some of them said they were forced to exhume corpses from the graves of various cemeteries and watch as the McMartin staff hacked up the bodies with knives. No corroborating evidence for these flights of dark fancy ever was produced, but it made great TV.

And then there were the tunnels. From the Frontline archives:

The children also described bizarre satanic rituals in which the McMartins mutilated animals in hidden underground tunnels beneath the school.

And to think, all of this happened years before Al Gore invented the Internet.

However, if you do a Google search right now for "McMartin preschool tunnels," you will be inundated with "studies" and "reports" that "prove" the tunnels did exist, and that the lurid fictions prompted out of the children by ambitious social workers were therefore true. Nothing dies on the Internet, not even the most arrant lunacy.

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This all came to mind when I was reading The Washington Post's account of the gentleman who showed up at a Washington D.C. pizza-and-fun palace over the weekend with his trusty shootin 'arn, pointed it at one employee, and then apparently got off one round before he was taken away by police.(Brief historical diversion: the gentleman was white, so he was not shot dead on the spot. We continue.) It seems he was one of those citizen investigators that we've heard so much about.

Matt Carr, the owner of the Little Red Fox market and coffee shop, said his business started getting threats last weekend. They got 30 to 40 calls before they stopped answering calls from blocked numbers, he said. "One person said he wanted to line us up in front of a firing squad," said Carr, who spent more than an hour in lockdown with his employees Sunday.The threats were all tied to the Comet Ping Pong accusations online, he said. "There's some old painted-over symbol on the marquee that they claim is an international symbol of pedophilia and that there are underground tunnels…"

Tunnels, again. Maybe they lead all the way across the country to Manhattan Beach. Someone should put that on Internet so we can all find out what's what and make ourselves more stupid in the process.

As has been made clear in a number of places, Comet Ping Pong is the central establishment in a bizarre rightwing conspiracy saga in which it is alleged that—and it's hard even to type this without a desperate thirst for liquid Thorazine—elements of the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign, up to and including chairman John Podesta, were running a child sex-slave operation out of the back of the restaurant and, apparently, out of the secret tunnels beneath. This is generally attributed to the hacked e-mails provided to the gullible by WikiLeaks and hashtagged into eternity by enthusiasts. Disruption! Thanks, Julian.

As a result, There have been threats against the owner of the place, his employees and, most recently, against the Post reporters who covered the incident over the weekend. There have been threats against neighboring businesses. Suddenly, a quiet patch of gentrification in the nation's capital is Ground Zero for the perfervid conservative imagination. It's Terri Schiavo's room at Woodside Hospice. It's the last exit off the NAFTA superhighway. It's where Hillary Clinton shot Vince Foster, hiding his body behind the pizza ovens until it could be relocated to Fort Marcy Park.

All of this is bad enough, but the people promulgating this inflammatory crapola include General Michael Flynn, who will be the National Security Advisor to the next president of the United States, and his son, who likely will be chief-of-staff for his Pops. As The Independent points out, the Flynns are quite comfortable trafficking in the stone crazy. Here's Pops:

This is not the first time Mr Flynn Jr has spread conspiratorial rhetoric via social media. He also alleged top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin had a connection to the Muslim Brotherhood and pushed a conspiracy theory that Sen Marco Rubio was a closeted homosexual who abused cocaine. His father also tweeted the hashtag #spiritcooking on 4 November, referring to the conspiracy that Ms. Clinton's former chairman John Podesta practiced satanic rituals.

On Sunday night, Junior tweeted that, until All The Facts on #pizzagate come out, "it'll remain a story." It's nice when fathers and sons have the same hobby.

(In case you're wondering, and you really shouldn't be at this point, radio maniac and Trump adviser Alex Jones also is on the case, and the pushback by the schizoid Illuminati is that the episode in Washington was a false-flag operation.)

My point is that none of us should be surprised at this point that it's all come to this, nor should we be surprised that it's attached itself finally to a president-elect. We all allowed this to grow in our country. The limitless American appetite for conspiracy theories was well-established long before Julian Assange was born. As the technology of the media improved, and the rate of transmission of information accelerated, the safeguards that kept our American taste for baroque explanations for scary and/or disliked phenomena proved inadequate to the public's appetite for them.

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Ronald Reagan's fast-and-loose relationship with reality was dismissed as charming. Both Bill Clinton's presidency, and Al Gore's subsequent campaign, were bedeviled by wild stories that were "out there" and, as such, given far too much oxygen by an elite political media that lost its ability to distinguish junk food from chateaubriand. Then came Judy Miller and the lies that helped sell the Iraqi disaster, as well as the truthless presence of Dick Cheney at the pinnacle of political power.

And, finally, birtherism, which first propelled into political prominence the man who will be the next president of the United States, who will tell you that three million illegal voters is why he lost the popular vote, and who will have advising him on national security a guy who thinks children are being molested in tunnels under a pizza joint. One of his primary surrogates, Scottie Nell Hughes, told an NPR panel that "There's no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts." But we have not "entered" an age of post-truth politics. We've been living in it for years. The Executive Branch of the government just has been slow to catch up. Now, it's right there with the rest of us, god help the country. We're all just the children of McMartin now. We'll say anything we're told until we come to believe it ourselves.

UPDATE: This just in -- the new nominee for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development is a guy who believes the pyramids were used to store grain. Something he saw on the Internet, I'm guessing.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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