When, in my adult life, in my own free time, of my own free will, had I sat in a room talking with someone like Damian or Emily? When had any of us, for that matter, spent time making friends on the other side of the ideological chasm of our country in the last four years? Though it shouldn’t have come as any surprise, I was nevertheless struck, when looking at Emily, with her immaculate white-blond bob, and collared blouse under her country club cardigan, and her talk of garden parties and canasta clubs, that she and Damian—who seemed to me to be the personification of a comments-thread troll, with tinted aviators, tinted pickup-truck windows, a sum total of ten minutes a week spent on personal hygiene—shared an identical vision of who should be leading our country.

The old me would have cut anti-vaxxers and truthers out of my life like Kevin Spacey was cut from that Ridley Scott movie. I think it says a lot about the patience and compassion I was cultivating through the sessions that I could still feel a kinship with people with whom I so fundamentally disagreed. Howard and Jo had created a space where that was possible; where radically divergent ideas could be shared without anyone feeling assailed or invalid. That said, despite the tangents, Howard invariably steered the conversation back towards the sensible and productive, which was critical. I would never have stuck with the meetings otherwise.

I would bet that you could have assembled, at random, ten Americans in 2019, and found the same level of conspiratorial thinking as existed in our discussions on Sequoia Crescent. I sincerely believe that it wasn’t anything unique to this particular group of individuals. It was simply the new register society was operating in. I told Kyle one night, after the meeting where the QAnon stuff first came up, that I remembered a time when conspiracy theories were niche and a little shameful, like kinky porn, not public camps of identification like religions or political parties, to respectfully ‘agree to disagree’ with. As we walked to my car, I said that it felt like the result of a society losing trust in itself and its institutions. Kyle didn’t seem nearly as unsettled by it as I was. He pointed out that there were insidious cabals and secret societies of elite, privileged men in this country that exerted untold influence over government and global finance.

I don’t blame the Damians of this world for feeling like they’re being conned, he once said. Why should someone like him trust the government or Wall Street or Silicon Valley?

I had to admit that I couldn’t disagree. Kyle said a part of him actually admired anti–status quo thinking.

Yeah, but there’s no truth anymore, I said. Just opinions.