This may be dismissed off-hand as the bizarre world of the madman, but it’s indicative of a broader social pattern of grave suspicion of social reality, a kind of full flowering reifying the post-truth world we’ve found ourselves in.  Entertainment has conquered reality after all, and buried the world of facts with it.  Everything became suspicious, cynical.  Art or entertainment no longer a reflection of the real world, but its hall of mirrors absorbing reality itself.  Only when everything became an absorbing simulation, reality became somehow more melodramatic.  It was emotional. It was meaner, fearful, dumber.  The masters of the suspicion proliferated in tandem with the explosion of the phony world, and everyone’s lost their minds.