“Yeah. I wouldn’t worry about it though, it’s not a big college town.”

Glenn Greenwald has a post observing that Laurence Tribe is advancing nutty conspiracy theories about Russia, up to and including praise for the “incomparable” Louise Mench. Sad, although having observed his rather bizarre late sharp rightward turn — starting with his praise for the incoherent and consequentially disastrous neoconfederate Medicaid holding in Sebelius, and proceeding to actual legal arguments that the 5th Amendment enacted Mr. Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia — I’m not really surprised. So far, so unexceptionable — his arguments here are nutty, and he is a Harvard Law Professor.

At this point, Glenn accelerates to 120 and turns straight off the bridge:

There has long been a fringe on the far right that believes the Clintons are responsible for murdering dozens of people in order to silence them. Sometimes, people who thought that way were in the mainstream, as evidenced by the leading role played by the Wall Street Journal editorial page in pushing the theory that Hillary Clinton had former White House attorney Vince Foster murdered.

But those people have been largely scorned and relegated to obscurity. The new conspiracy theorists — the ones who casually suggest that when a plane crashes, it is really a secret attempt by Putin and Trump to silence one of the passengers (who wasn’t even a passenger) — are found not on far right websites, but on MSNBC and at Harvard Law School, with constantly growing social media followings and increasingly viral tweets.

Whoa, whoa, let’s back up here…

those people have been largely scorned and relegated to obscurity.

I…wow. Just wow.

You may remember the fairly widespread conservative conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. The most prominent popularizer of this theory was a New York real estate grifter and reality show star named Donald J. Trump. Mr. Trump is now [checks cue card] President of the United States of America. And his conspiracy theorizing is hardly incidental to the rise to the presidency; he became prominent in Republican politics because he advanced a crackpot racist conspiracy theory. And of course, he’s in large measure president because of minor misconduct revealed and distorted by the Benghazi conspiracy theory propounded by prominent Republican members of Congress and amplified relentlessly by conservative media. Glenn’s good friends at Trump’s house propaganda network advanced the conspiracy theory that the DNC had Seth Rich killed, and just yesterday its most prominent host claimed to find “secret sperm” in the official portrait of Barack Obama. Evidently, this is far from an exhaustive list of the conspiracy theories advanced by conservatives with far more power and influence than Larry Tribe in 2018.

Glenn’s inability to recognize the existence of Republicans with any power remains genuinely astounding. Combined with his repeated and utterly fantastical assertions that America’s elites were united against Donald Trump, I honestly can’t decide if it’s worse if these arguments are being advanced in good faith or bad faith.