The more I learn about her recent activities, however, the less I am able to accept the premise of these questions. They imply that when she went over the edge, she crashed to the ground. A more accurate description is that Wolf marched over the edge and was promptly caught in the arms of millions of people who agree with every one of her extraordinary theories without question, and who appear to adore her. So, while she clearly has lost what I may define as “it”, she has found a great deal more – she has found a whole new world, one I have come to think of as the Mirror World.

Conspiracies have always swirled in times of crisis – but never before have they been a booming industry in their own right.

In practice, this squared virality meant that if you put out the right kind of pandemic-themed content – flagged with the right mix-and-match of keywords and hashtags (“Great Reset”, “WEF”, “Bill Gates”, “Fascism”, “Fauci”, “Pfizer”) and headlined with tabloid-style teasers (“The Leaders Colluding to Make Us Powerless”, “What They Don’t Want You to Know About”, “Shocking Details Revealed”, “Bill Gates Said WHAT?!?”) – you could catch a digital magic-carpet ride that would make all previous experiences of virality seem leaden in comparison.

And nothing had ever been nearly so hot, so potentially clout-rich, as Covid-19. We all know why. It was global. It was synchronous. We were digitally connected, talking about the same thing for weeks, months, years, and on the same global platforms. As Steven W Thrasher writes in The Viral Underclass, Covid-19 marked “the first viral pandemic also to be experienced via viral stories on social media”, creating “a kind of squared virality”.

Because what Wolf turned into over the past decade is something very specific to our time: a clout chaser. Clout is the values-free currency of the always-online age – both a substitute for hard cash as well as a conduit to it. Clout is a calculus not of what you do, but of how much bulk you-ness there is in the world. You get clout by playing the victim. You get clout by victimizing others. This is something that is understood by the left and the right. If influence sways, clout squats, taking up space for its own sake.

The big misinformation players may be chasing clout, but plenty of people believe their terrifying stories

Wolf is getting everything she once had and lost – attention, respect, money, power. Just through a warped mirror

At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.

If the claims are coming from the far right, the covert plan is for a green/socialist/no-borders/Soros/forced-vaccine dictatorship, while the new agers warn of a big pharma/GMO/biometric-implant/5G/robot-dog/forced-vaccine dictatorship. With the exception of the Covid-related refresh, the conspiracies that are part of this political convergence are not new – most have been around for decades, and some are ancient blood libels. What’s new is the force of the magnetic pull with which they are finding one another, self-assembling into what the Vice reporter Anna Merlan has termed a “conspiracy singularity”.

couple of months earlier, Wolf had released a video claiming that those vaccine-verification apps so many of us downloaded represented a plot to institute “slavery for ever”. The apps would usher in a “CCP-style social credit score system” in “the West”, she said