Nothing better illustrates the extent to which conspiracy-mongering is killing the conservative media ecosystem than all the fervent talk about how a secret network of leftist intelligence officials is plotting to overthrow the presidency of Donald Trump.

Diet-pill salesman and far-right talk show host Alex Jones provided the most comical evidence for this during his Tuesday program when he joyously told listeners that he had been given a much-hyped memorandum written by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and other Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. This apocryphal document supposedly provides iron-clad proof that crazed “Deep State” bureaucrats working in the FBI and elsewhere used the privately funded dossier of allegations against Trump collected by former British spy Christopher Steele to justify illegal wiretapping of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

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Scores of House Republicans have hyped “the memo” as utterly damning, yet neither they nor Trump have chosen to release it or the documents on which it was based.

“I mean, I told you I have sources and that I’d reverse-engineered” the memo, Jones boasted, seemingly on the verge of hyperventilation or cardiac arrest. “I’m having trouble conducting the show here.”

Since his radio stations had to go to a commercial break, Jones instructed his camera crew to focus a “document cam” on the papers that he was rifling through, to capture images of the pages for viewers who wanted to hit "pause" and examine them while the sponsor messages played.

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But as Jones (who frequently boasts about his personal access to Trump during the president’s many hours of “executive time”) was soon to learn via instant Twitter mockery, his prized printout was nothing more than a court opinion that had been posted online since at least May of last year.

After being ridiculed for his obvious error — the very first page of the document states that it is a judicial ruling — Jones tried to pin blame on unnamed hackers who had seized control of one of his employees’ computers, apparently in support of a “globalist” conspiracy to destroy all nation-states worldwide, just as they were going to upload the document to his InfoWars website.

“While we’re trying to post it, they grab control of the computer and turn it off and fry it right in front of us and then start jumping in — they are inside our computers right now,” Jones said, not bothering to show any evidence of the supposedly nuked PC or explain why the omnipotent hackers hadn't just killed his live stream.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=8kYvIr-1GCE

Trying to save face, the pill-pushing host falsely claimed that President Trump had already published the document Jones’ invisible enemies tried to block:

“But they can’t stop us — they can’t stop us from publishing it because guess what, idiots? Trump already published it. It already got published, we haven’t told you yet. You’re fools! So, you’re not going to stop anything, globalists. Understand that!”

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Amid a decades-long career of promoting half-baked ideas, Jones’ Tuesday embarrassment won’t be long remembered. What is much more significant is how the gravel-voiced Texan came to believe he had been given a top-secret document and what that means for the American right.

While hyping up his purported release of the memo, Jones said he had been sent it by William Binney, a former NSA official turned whistleblower, who in retirement has become a conspiracy theorist in his own right. Among other ill-considered recent ideas, Binney is best-known for the grossly unsupported claim that Democratic National Committee emails stolen during the 2016 campaign were actually leaked by a DNC insider, perhaps the subsequently murdered Seth Rich (who had no known abilities as a programmer or hacker), rather than by a team of outside hackers using tools that have been linked to a Russian intelligence agency.

In a sane political environment, frequently spouting such nonsense would consign someone to providing commentary for the Weekly World News or other media outlets known for wild speculation or outright fabrication. Instead, Binney has become a minor celebrity on the right, being cited scores of times in Fox News stories.

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Binney’s star rose even higher in November when Trump, taking his policy agenda from TV as usual, ordered CIA Director Mike Pompeo to meet with Binney at the agency’s headquarters. (Pompeo has said he stands by the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russian agents were behind the DNC hack, however.)

Nonsensical speculation about a secret but amazingly widespread anti-Trump conspiracy out has moved far beyond tales of a “conveniently” murdered voter registration staffer, however.

The latest version, which originated on the far-right troll bulletin boards of 4chan and 8chan, holds that Trump is about to launch a massive attack on all these nefarious bureaucrats based on the word of an anonymous person who posts under the pseudonym “Q” and presents himself as a White House insider.

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According to Q (or QAnon as he has been dubbed by fans), an offhand remark Trump made in October about “the calm before the storm” was actually a secret tip-off from the president. He was about to go nuclear against the legions of globalist intelligence officials who have incessantly leaked tidbits about the administration and the ongoing investigations into the Trump campaign's contacts with Russians in 2016.

Never mind that the biggest White House leaker was clearly former far-right impresario Steve Bannon, not a cabal of supposedly treasonous bureaucrats, many on the right are all too eager to believe an anonymous poster on a racist-troll website because he uploaded a picture of a pen on a desk and some photos of clouds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=1ZNfcjc8yf4

“The Storm” is essentially a theory of everything: It ties together tales of the Deep State gone rogue, debunked claims about a Canadian mining company called Uranium One and the ludicrous Pizzagate fabrication in which high-ranking Democrats, Wall Street financiers and celebrities like model Chrissy Teigen were secretly running a child-slavery ring out of a Washington pizza parlor.

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Former FBI director James Comey and special counsel Robert Mueller are involved as well, of course — secretly working with Trump to attack the globalists via a scheme worthy of “The Dark Knight.”

Recapping the larger contours of The Storm, Will Sommer, a reporter for The Hill, explained why it has become so popular in the furthest-right corners of the internet:

“Despite The Storm’s vastness, though, the message is simple: Trump is pulling off a string of victories over his enemies, but in secret; and everything that looks like it’s bad news for Trump is actually, secretly, good news.”

Since he was so fond of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, it is no surprise that Fox News host Sean Hannity has come very close to parroting the Q allegations. On Jan. 9, he retweeted a post from an anonymous Twitter user who provides “prophetic insights” in the form of obsessive tweets about The Storm theory.

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Liz Crokin, an obscure YouTuber who has been trying to make a name for herself by fabricating stories about Teigen and others, told her viewers the next day that Hannity was doing the very best he could under pain of death.

“Let me tell you, Sean is — man, that guy has got balls,” she said, citing unspecified “inside information” that Hannity urgently wants to talk on-air about The Storm. “I’m shocked he’s still alive. I mean, it’s unbelievable he’s still alive. He has risked his life to expose what he has exposed, that no one else in the mainstream media is exposing.”

The idea that nefarious bureaucrats are willing to do anything to bring down Trump and other Republicans has inspired all sorts of other takes. One especially idiotic example was Rush Limbaugh’s Tuesday hypothesis that Deep State actors had fabricated the evidence that deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed chemical weapons, in order to dupe former president George W. Bush into pursuing a disastrous foreign war.

“What if Saddam weapons of mass destruction was also a false narrative designed to ... destroy his presidency in the second term?” the radio talker wondered aloud.

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Others, including Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., claim to have seen or heard evidence about a “secret society” within the FBI that began working to destroy Trump the moment he won election.

In fairness, not every prominent Republican is buying into this massive über-Benghazi conspiracy theory.

“I think there’s a lot of paranoia around here when it comes to that topic,” Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said last week, after emerging from a secure room that houses the classified document that Alex Jones wants more than a truckload of penis pills.

Even Johnson, who was so confident earlier in the week about his claims, was forced to admit on Thursday that the text message “evidence” of a Deep State plot at the FBI he had cited earlier was probably just a joke.

Unfortunately for Cornyn, who is a staunch conservative but not quite a fire-breathing zealot, he's now outnumbered within his caucus and his party. Unlike during the Obama presidency, the conspiracy theorists now have access to the entirety of the entire national security state machine as well.

“What began as an attempt to discredit the investigator has now devolved into delusional, self-serving paranoia,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-NY, remarked at a Thursday news conference in reference to Johnson’s earlier allegations.

In the old days, Republican political consultants were happy to let purveyors of nonsense exist on the fringes of the conservative movement, as long as the motivated the nutjobs to come out and vote. In a classic illustration of the Biblical admonition that you will sow as you have reaped, it’s the crazy racist uncles of right-wing politics who are effectively now in charge.