The response to the pandemic showed vividly how this unholy alliance operates: for months early in 2020, right-wing media and the president pursued a two-track propaganda effort that made a catastrophe worse. Fantasyland’s magical thinking and conspiracism and mistrust of science fueled the widespread denial of and indifference to the crisis, and fused with the evil geniuses’ immediate, cold-blooded certainty that a rapid restoration of business-as-usual must take precedence over saving economically useless Americans’ lives.
