Depending on who you listen to, hang out with, or read, a hit summer movie about saving kidnapped children is laced with QAnon references, the video for an anti-violence country music hit traffics in racism, and a Hillary Clinton-voting comedian, arguably the most successful of his age, is a dangerous right-wing transphobe.

None of these things are true, but to the paranoid mindset that rules civic life in America, and that now fully encompasses art and culture, that hardly matters.

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