The collapse of the modern Republican Party can be broken into three Fox News eras. In the first, Fox News executives sought to boost the party by framing news stories with a partisan bent that presumed, as default, that conservative ideologies were always Good and not-conservative solutions were always Bad. In the second era, network hosts began to construct ever-more-elaborate conspiracy theories to explain to the network’s viewers that when conservative ideologies were tried and demonstrably sucked—say, an attempt to remake a captured foreign power into a conservative market utopia by sending Some Dudes over there to write some memos and sort things out—the failures were only because the party’s enemies had conspired against them. None of the power brokers involved cared which parts were true or false—each conspiracy was just an excuse to be dished out between commercial breaks so that the watching rubes would not change either parties or channels.

In the third and current era, the one we find ourselves in, a generation of American conservatives who were weaned on the crackpot conspiracy nonsense of Fox News themselves began to run for office—that is, the Fox audience so gullible as to fall for two decades of crackpot nonsense and believe all of it began winning office and managing government affairs as if the things that burped out of Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity were actually true—and things rapidly turned to absolute shit, because governing by conspiracy theory and convenient hoax turns out to be exactly as catastrophic as anyone would expect.

Coupled with longstanding conservative contempt for specific classes of Americans, the result turns out to be indistinguishable from fascism. It is an entire movement of the most gullible people you have ever met, voted into office by twitching angry paranoids even more gullible than that. Oh look, and here comes House Republican Chip Roy.

You wondered where I was going with that, didn’t you. But it was always going to end with Texas House Republican Chip Roy. Feed it enough of the Murdoch family’s special brew, and there is no way that the grand arc of history wouldn’t eventually pop out a Chip Roy.

Over the past few days, House Republican Chip Roy, a man ostensibly tasked with keeping the nation’s government semi-functional or, at least, not slitting its throat and leaving it in a ditch as part of a grander cult ritual, repeatedly pushed the premise that: 1) Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had fled his country because 2) a convoy of anti-vaccine truck drivers had somehow driven him out and 3) the Canadian prime minister was now hiding somewhere in the United States and so 4) we must find Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, wherever he is hiding, and 5) deport him because … uh … well, just because he needs to be deported, that’s why.

Chip Roy, an actual sitting lawmaker of sorts and pro-Trumpian bobblehead, believed this because an anonymous Twitter account said so, and if an anonymous Twitter account says something you had better believe that Texas-elected House Republican Trump supporters are going treat it as Holy Internet Gospel.

And so, on this random weekday in the middle of Republicanism’s fascist shudder, we are graced with news stories clarifying that the conspiracy theory a member of Congress is demanding government action based on is absolute brain-rattling bullpoop.

Welcome to America, post-coup-number-one but pre-coup-number-two. The prime minister of Canada has been driven into exile by a group of yelling truckers and nobody gets to rest until we find the man and deliver him to the truckers hunting for him. Or something.

Now, that’s where CNN and other outlets are leaving the story, but that’s not good enough. No, this feels like the sort of story where merely knocking down a conspiracy theory burped by an actual(???) elected leader is leaving the most important bits of the story unsaid—and in a time when we very very much need to be saying them. The issue here is not that Chip Roy believed an anonymous internet account and demanded the United States government take immediate action to respond to the imaginary thing. The issue here is that somehow, yet another of the supposed best minds Republicanism has to offer genuinely believed an asinine conspiracy theory that nobody of sound mind could possibly believe unless they were dead drunk or on Every Single Drug.

No, we need to chew on this for a while. Chip Roy thought that the Canadian prime minister had been driven from his country by truck drivers. Was in hiding. Had been effectively deposed by team Old Burt Reynolds Movie.

And it was now incumbent on the United States to return the (ahem) Prime Minister of Freaking Canada to BJ, the Bear, Dom DeLuise, or whoever is actually the head of Canadian Truck Convoy Authority so that the cowardly prime minister could face Canadian anti-vaxx justice.

No, no, no, no, no. You do not get to gloss over any of that, and neither does CNN, and neither does Chip Freaking Roy of Texas. It will be seared into all of our brains forever, and we all deserve it because a bunch of Texas yahoos stared at each other and came up with Chip Roy as the person among them who most embodies what it means to be them—their values; their solutions; their thoughts on trucker sovereignty.

Chip Roy needs to be sentenced to appearing on an hour-long television program to explain just what part of this he found plausible to begin with.

If you need to know any more details, here they all are. There was a very Trumpian protest by not-very-many Canadian truckers and people who associate with Canadian truckers who are outraged that, during a pandemic, long-haul truckers who by definition are traveling all around the country, during a pandemic, are now required to be vaccinated against the during a pandemic disease that has been pandemicking its way all around the globe. This is primarily news because the truckers have defaced monuments, tried to provoke fights, and generally behaved like American anti-vaxx protesters.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, however, just announced he has contracted COVID-19 himself and will be quarantining like a responsible non-crappy human being. His location is undisclosed, which in politics-speak probably means “is sitting on his couch at home.”

Everything else was just invented by the first troll who could come up with a way to tie news story A to news story B in the way that would be most pleasing to the most gullible people on the planet, and there is no cohort of “the most gullible people on the planet” that does not include at least one elected Texas Republican and you and I both know it.

Is this a problem? Is it a problem that the people responsible (ostensibly) for writing our laws or at least skimming through the laws corporate lobbyists send them are so astonishingly gullible that they will believe, apparently, literally any conspiracy theory that sneaks into their ears or eyeballs? Yes! This is extremely alarming! We are, as a country, basically screwed if half our elected leaders think that their enemies are conspiring in the basements of basementless pizza restaurants and Joe Trucker From Canada has now toppled their nation’s government! Jeebus, how can this not be an existential national crisis? We’re boned! It’s a pandemic, half the country doesn’t even give a damn, and a good chunk of the damn-withholders are instead rattling around through the bowels of conspiracydom hunting for new conspiracy trinkets to pin entirely new personalities around!

We’re not in danger as a country merely because the broad majority of one of the two dominant political parties now supports coup over even a temporary loss of power; we’re in danger because everyone involved with the movement is the kind of hollow-brained jackass who watches Tucker Carlson at night and is willing to believe absolutely anything that some intern shoves onto a chyron.

How long will it be before a Chip Roy type—a post-Donald Trump Donald Trump supporter who doesn’t know or care whether a story is truth or fiction, so long as it can be yelled about—launches a military incursion premised on returning a foreign prime minister to a collection of truck drivers, or bombs a foreign city because of a report that the children there were learning about “seahorse sex” and this new threat must be snuffed out before it can infect fragile American minds?

No, we are well and truly boned when the likes of Chip Roy can be flushed into national office by the Fox News-watching parts of the country. There used to be a difference between the cynical types who would promote conspiracy theories and the stay-at-home paranoids who nod their heads and believe it all, but the cynical types have all retired or died off. There’s only true believers now, and they’re rewriting state laws or overturning old precedents based on whatever weird-ass theory comes out of Tucker Carlson’s mouth.

Sure, fine, let’s all “fact check” whether the Canadian prime minister had to flee the country because a convoy of yelling truckers had hurt his feelings to the point of self-deportation. And then let’s all sit down for a heart-to-heart conversation about whether Chip Roy believing this, over the span of multiple days, is a sign of incompetence so incompetent that we maybe need to take his congressional pin and lock him out of his Capitol office until we sort all this out.