Thank you, people, perhaps thousands of miles away from the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, about a month ago, where a would-be assassin nearly picked off former President Trump.

Because, by some mental processes of which I am sadly, unfortunately, unaware, and with which almighty God did not endow me, you were so in touch with the cosmic information highway that within moments, you knew everything.

And who done it, too, and on his and his like you properly fixed blame. Even though at that moment you didn’t even have a name. Goodie on you.

“Can’t be one of our guys. We have to get our version out there immediately so people settle on it,” you reasoned.

Oh, and an extra thank you to those networks that snatched up what you were saying, and galloped off with it. And how in the immediate aftermath of that reporting, what you knew you knew, hardened into a mass.

Again, goodie on you.

But of course, the opinion was uninformed, an ignorant opinion that immediately stuck together for the faithful into something we once fondly called truth.

Oh, the gross tonnage of BS being flung into the air, and all of the Americans out to catch it with their eager tongues and gulp it down wholesale!

On the right and on the left. For the right, it was the Democrats who did it. For the left, it was a Trump campaign conspiracy to boost his re-election prospects.

I know this has not been aberration at any time of our history, to believe what we believe, and to cling to it. But with the rise of social media and opinion networks masquerading as news, it now gains such heft that even the lever of Archimedes could not budge it. And it’s lethal.

We no longer wait for the authorities to do their jobs, and any notion of shared convictions based on real evidence is a casualty. Up is now down, down is now up. Just look at what this has done to us. We’re beating each other over the heads with “alternate facts.” It’s the tolling of our death knell as a nation.

An insightful CNN piece traced our national obsession with conspiracies in part to the government’s deceptions following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. We now know that in the aftermath, the CIA withheld information from the Warren Commission on the more than 600 attempts it made to orchestrate the death of Fidel Castro, and the FBI withheld information on what it had known about Lee Harvey Oswald.

An infamous CYA operation.

Watergate did not help. Neither did the government’s hush-hush policy on UFOs, or any of the lies it’s been caught telling over the years.

The great German philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt’s extensive body of work includes many discussions on truth, lies, and the nature of totalitarianism. She covered the famous trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in 1962, and from it invented the famous phrase “the banality of evil.” The following quote reflects themes from her writing on these subjects.

“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”

Arendt continued: “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any conclusions of one’s own.”

So, to paraphrase one modern demagogue and polemicist: Our aim is not to destroy a particular party. Our aim is to destroy the media. He said he wanted to make it so that the people would not know what to believe anymore at all.

Robert Whale can be reached at rwhale@soundpublishing.com.