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My regular readers know that sometimes I’ll take a roundabout route to get to my point.

Dave’s Regular Readers: “Sometimes? You pull that shit every week.”

Sorry, imaginary regular readers. You want me to be brief? Maybe you should’ve fought harder to keep me on Twitter like you do for Nazis like Lucas Gage. Because then I could quip instead of essay.

Dave’s Regular Readers: “Why are you yelling at us? We’re imaginary. By the way, how’s that descent into schizophrenia coming along?”

Quite well, imaginary regular readers. Quite well.

See what I did there? I took a roundabout route to get to my roundabout route to get to my point. As a writer, I’m very much like a stinkbug. Unpleasant and unwanted, but still in its own way a marvel of nature.

So here’s the roundabout route. In my youth I was an accomplished musical theater actor, winning two Macy Awards (that’s the national high school musical theater trophy) for my role as Bobby in the 1986 production of A Chorus Line and as Sorebutt McGee in the 1985 production of Slappy Dickthruster AIDS His Friends (my character sings the classic ballad “He shoved it, he shoved it, and surprisingly I loved it. Yet now my joy is stalling; my T-cell count is falling”).

The joke is that musical theater is gay. Just in case I was being too subtle.

I loved musical theater because as a straight guy I never understood why it was more “manly” to grab dudes by the waist and wrestle around with them on a gridiron than it was to serenade beautiful ladies on a stage. Musical theater was where the hot white chicks were; football was where the sweaty black dudes dwelled. Not that I could’ve played football anyway. I was frail back then. And today? I’m so weak a small breeze could knock me over.

And a large breeze could kill me, which is why I refused to stand behind Roseanne Barr at last week’s MAGA chili cook-off.

Dave’s Imaginary Regular Readers: “Will you get to the fucking point, asshole?”

Memo to self—up the clozapine to 20mg.

Brigadoon was my least favorite play. Thank God I never had to be in it. It’s everything people hate about musicals. Sappy, slow-paced, cloying. But for all its faults, it features one instructive moment.

For those unfamiliar with this faggoty crapfest (i.e., anyone married with children), the plot centers on two 1950s hipster-cat New Yorkers (“skibidee-bee-bop hep mamma, jazz, cigarettes, and lung cancer”) on vacation in the U.K. who find themselves trapped in a supernatural Scottish village that only appears out of the highland mist once every 100 years so that the locals can sing shitty songs.

Yes, it’s every bit as exciting as it sounds.

So the hepcats (played by Gene Kelly and Van Johnson in the 1954 MGM film version, a movie that used to be employed to euthanize death row prisoners until the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1974) are stuck in this ghostly town. The Kelly character really takes to the place. He falls in love with a ghost girl and he chows down on ghost haggis and generally finds ghost life appealing. But the other city slicker can’t deal with the fact that the town, by its very existence, violates the laws of physical reality. The idea that there’s a ghost village and ghost girls and ghost haggis drives him mad; his mind is broken by the notion that the laws of physics are suspended in this place.

He ends up killing one of the ghost inhabitants, and he says to his buddy, “What’s it matter? Nothing is real here. And if nothing is real, why should I care if I kill a guy or not? Reality doesn’t exist in this place.”

Of course, I’m paraphrasing the text.

Dave’s Imaginary Regular Readers: “You were too drunk and lazy to cut-and-paste the actual dialogue from the play, weren’t you?”

Memo to self—30mg.

Anyway, it’s an interesting concept in an otherwise forgettable play. Two young “modern men” find themselves in a land of unreality. One takes to it like a fish to water, while the other can’t get past the lack of logic and reason. And the latter guy ends up killing a man because why not? In a magic land where everything’s an illusion, where reality doesn’t dwell, why worry about anything?

Which brings me to the Trump assassination attempt conspiracy theories…

Dave’s Imaginary Regular Readers: “Oh, you’re finally getting to the fucking point?”

…and the fact that we have not one but two conspiracy theories on the right.

The Alex Jones/MAGA theory: The Secret Service, in (secret) service to THEE DEEP STATE, set Trump up to be shot. But a lucky head move on his part at the very last second saved him. “They” tried to kill MAGA, and “they” failed. Praise kek, groyp, and doge for that head tilt. Alex Jones says there was a second shooter, yet both missed the kill shot.

And then we have the Unz theory: Jews don’t lose. If Jews had genuinely wanted to kill Trump, they’d have succeeded. Jews never miss. The fact that Trump survived means that he was meant to. The Jew-backed “shooter” had a clear bead on the guy, so the “miraculous survival” is by itself proof that the entire thing is a charade, staged by the kikes to fool MAGA into thinking Trump is on their side.

Where do we find the logic, the reason, the through line of rationality here? Jones is applying none of his Sandy Hook skepticism. It’s not just that the video of the shooter’s dead body on the roof shows no cascade of blood (see last week’s column), it’s that the guiding principle of every conspiracy nutcase is “cui bono.” According to Jones and every similar lunatic, “cui bono” is all it takes to suss the truth of any event. The person who “bonos” is always the culprit. And Trump “bono’d” the most from the shooting. Heroic photo op, grazed ear injury, Biden drops out, classified documents case nixed.

CNBC did a whole piece on Trump’s post-shooting bonos.

I wrote about the “cui bono” idiocy in 2017—this is far from a new theme for me—so maybe it’s striking me more than you the extent to which it’s earth-shaking that Jones has dropped “cui bono” as his sleuthing tool of choice. It’s like Sherlock Holmes surrendering his spyglass. And nobody’s noticing it. The “noticers” aren’t noticing.

And according to Unz, the Jews faked the Trump shooting because they want him reelected…but if “they” hadn’t “stollen” the 2020 election he’d still be in office, so they robbed him of a victory only to then be like, “Oy, wotta mistake we made,” so they hoax up an assassination attempt when…I mean…if they control election outcomes, why not just re-steal the 2024 election for Trump? Why the need for a public spectacle? Just manipulate the election results.

To be fair, there are leftists who are calling the Trump shooting a false flag, and they’re proving my point that at the core there’s no difference between leftist and rightist lunatic ideologues. Mae Brussell and Alex Jones are the same beast. But damn, it’s fun to see MAGAs being Alex Jonesed by the left. Where’d the blood come from on Trump’s ear? He ducks down and suddenly it’s there when he stands up? That American flag photo-op pic is too perfect! Eyewitnesses at the event tell conflicting stories of what they saw (which according to Alex Jones is proof that an event was purposely faked as opposed to proof eyewitnesses are unreliable not due to conspiracy but honest memory imperfections). Where was the ear bandage the next day? Why’d it suddenly appear a day later the size of a pancake? And what about the spectators in the stand? Some don’t seem to be acting as I would if I were witnessing an assassination attempt.

Hey, leftists are just asking qwestchins! They’re noticing!

Seeing MAGAs get Jonesed by “qwestchins” might be the greatest pleasure I’ve taken all year. You embraced this shit—now eat it.

But the icing on the cake was that the Trump assassination attempt conspiracy theories came the same week that Candace Owens declared that she can no longer believe in a round earth, because she no longer believes in science. The earth may very well be flat, says the retarded ghetto welfare whore you shower with donations. Physical reality doesn’t exist, she says.

It’s Brigadoon. Ghost village, flat earth.

It’s astonishing—and horrific—that one of the highest-profile rightists who claims to oppose trannyism is now saying “science isn’t real.” The only argument against trannyism is that two-sex gender is an undeniable scientific reality. But now Owens is saying that “there is no science.” Okay, so in that case “a man who thinks he’s a woman becomes a woman” can’t be disproved. It’s as correct as “the earth is a floating pie tin.”

Jesus Christ.

Are any of you people actually enjoying this?

And some of the highest-profile rightist accounts on Twitter are claiming that Biden died weeks ago and was replaced by a robot or AI or a dude in a mask.

Yep, it’s all fun and games.

Except the thing is, the current rightist fetish of “everything’s fake we’re in the Matrix it’s all an illusion the earth is flat the Holocaust never happened” might be a poor long-term strategy. How can I best put this…if you’ve ever owned a working or herding dog, as I have, you know that anarchy makes them unstable. They need structure. Human children also need structure. Structure is important in keeping the world functioning. Structure means stability. Maybe the wackiest aspect of the Alex Jones “reality’s an illusion” dumbasses is that many of these loons are into crypto, a system dependent upon belief in the reality of the system. Belief makes crypto strong. If you stop believing, crypto fails.

Yet these same cretins joyfully scream, “There’s no reality! Believe in nothing,” and they don’t expect any societal repercussions. But of course there’ll be. Yes, it’s hilarious fun to tweet flat earth! Holohoax! But when you push the “it’s all an illusion” talking point, you’re going to divide the audience. Some, like the Gene Kelly character in Brigadoon, will eat it up. They’ll love it. But others, like the Van Johnson character, will check out. It will alienate them. If nothing matters and it’s all holograms and hoaxes, why even take part? Why vote?

As we approach November, rightists—not all, but way too many—are banking on “everything’s a staged op” as a winning strategy. Okay, roll them dice. Nobody listens to me anyway, so let’s just see if it works. Maybe Harris will prove such a bad candidate that this fetid strategy succeeds.

I make no predictions. I say nothing more than I’m curious to see how it turns out for you.

Best of luck.