You can't shock me at the age of 66 but you can surprise me on occasion...
I have an employee in her mid-50's: she used to work for a very fine law firm for thirty years until her managing partner retired and she did the same for a couple years and came out of retirement and works for me as a receptionist/scheduler. She is fantastic at her job, very thorough, attentive to detail, friendly to patients of all stripes, engaging, a little profane but in a funny way, not in that hold-your-head manner. She comes to work early and leaves late, files everything before she walks out the door, answers the phones on the first ring and has perfect telephone mastery which is very hard to find these days.
But she is not just a Trump supporter: she believes that there is a planet identical to Earth on the other side of the Sun, (yes I know this is nothing new) and the alien visitors are the ones making things happen here and are in control of everything from economics, politics, and the climate alterations using their advanced machines. She also believes that there is another Sun, though much smaller behind the planet Jupiter in direct alignment and we can never see it and it was placed there for some unimaginable reason having to do with our tides and other vagaries of the Earth. This is not a joke to her and her discovering more about all of this is a serious enterprise. She has other beliefs which I've forgotten but I do recall thinking to myself that they were extremely creative and I myself could never have invented them in a million years.
And she speaks of these things with the utmost authority, the way you'd explain how the sun rises and sets to a four year old or how a doorbell works when you push a button. It's staggering. If you met her in a checkout line you'd think, now THERE'S a normal, terrific lady who really has her head together. But just below the surface there is this certainty of bizarre concepts and strange thought style. You just never know. That's how Qanon and Nazification and Fascism and Totalitarianism can flourish rather easily. There are many willing subjects and they're disguised as normal people.
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