On conspiracy as a political instrument, with insights on the situation in Poland. Great piece by @anneapplebaum https://t.co/mHC9Ygqv1J

— David Cadier (@DavidCadier) September 19, 2016

RTWT. It ends with this:

[…]

I realize that there is far more detail here about Poland than most non-Polish readers care to know. But I’m offering it for a reason. Trump, like Kaczynski, pushed a patently false conspiracy theory hard for many years, despite the utter lack of evidence. Last week, he found it expedient to discard that theory, but once he is president, he might find it expedient to adopt it again — or perhaps to push one of the many others he has championed. As president, he can then use the state — the Justice Department, the security bureaucracy, the FBI — to pursue them. A Trump administration could make birtherism the excuse for fake investigations, hearings and even trials that would do terrible and irreversible damage to U.S. politics and the rule of law.

It all sounds unthinkable, of course. But if you’d asked me five years ago, or even one year ago, I would have told you that the transformation of the Smolensk conspiracy theory into state ideology was unthinkable, too. And yet it has come to pass.