To the editor:

I owe MAGA an apology — though “MAGA” is really shorthand for something broader. I’m talking about the conspiracy theories that many, maybe most, MAGA voters have repeated for decades, long before there was QAnon and even before Alex Jones became a household name. Ideas once dismissed as fringe — muttered by tin-foil-hatted callers on late-night Art Bell radio shows — now appear less absurd than before.

We’re discovering, it seems, that shape-shifting lizard people do, actually, control the levers of power. Or at least something close enough to them does. Plastic surgery, after all, is a kind of shape-shifting, and there’s a visible trend among powerful individuals who once appeared recognizably human choosing to reveal something more primal. As their basal ganglia and amygdala assert dominance, instincts like self-preservation, mating aggression and hoarding take over. In this sense, David Icke wasn’t entirely wrong — and perhaps he’s also owed an apology.

But it goes beyond the simple acknowledgment that “They Live.” They were right about many other things as well. Their failure wasn’t one of imagination, but of attribution. Who could fault them, when the puppeteers proved so adept at operating from the shadows?

Among the conspiracy-theory staples revived in recent years, we’ve witnessed something resembling an actual Manchurian Candidate: obedient dog-wagging, a suspiciously theatrical assassination attempt, followed by a second — very real and conspicuously Trumped-up — martyr-making episode with all the grim pageantry of a Horst Wessel redux. We’ve also been forced to confront the uncomfortable reality that “Pizzagate-style” pedophile rings weren’t pure fantasy — merely mislocated. Not hidden in the basement of a neighborhood pizzeria, but embedded within the upper floors of power itself, protected by movie moguls, financiers, politicians and even members of various royal families. A now illuminated Illuminati.

They also warned us that the Constitution — the very mother that birthed our belief in ourselves as free people — would prove insufficient against such schemes. They argued that its text and amendments were little more than words written on vapor.

Many of us still cling to the naive conviction that those words possess some intrinsic magic, that they’ll save us from plotters and usurpers simply by having been written down. Day by day, however, we’re reminded that those words mean only what five members of the Supreme Court decide they mean.

And because so many of these conspiracy theories have proven prescient, others have begun to escape the box that once confined them. Forever chemicals saturating the groundwater–check. Our private information harvested and stored on privately controlled servers –done. Cash quietly rendered obsolete, our financial lives consolidated under institutions that strip us of meaningful ownership — well underway.

In this light, we owe them an apology for dismissing what they foretold. But they owe us one as well. Their fury at being cast as Cassandra — condemned to see the future and never be believed — hardened into something more dangerous than insight. Blinded by resentment, they voted not to prevent catastrophe but to vindicate their own prophecies, transforming warnings into blueprints and suspicion into self-fulfilling fate. For that, apologies are insufficient and forgiveness is not an option.

J. David Core

Toronto