In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”

He then concluded that the “best humane alternative to genocide” is to “virtualize” these people: Imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement” where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface” so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”

Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers, chief among them: tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé Senator J.D. Vance, whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald Trump’s vice president. If Trump wins the election, there is little doubt that Vance will bring Yarvin’s twisted techno-authoritarianism to the White House, and one can imagine—with horror—what a receptive would-be autocrat like Trump might do with those ideas.

Trump’s first campaign was undoubtedly a watershed moment for authoritarianism in American politics, but some thinkers on the right had been laying the groundwork for years, hoping for someone to mainstream their ideas. Yarvin was one of them. Way back in 2012, in a speech on “How to Reboot the US Government,” he said, “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.” He had also written favorably of slavery and white nationalists in the late 2000s (though he has stated that he is not a white nationalist himself).

I’m really worried about my adoptive homeland, the United States. It isn’t just that a would-be assassin targeted Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday 13 July. Horrifying as the public attempt on the life of one of the two major-party presidential nominees was, it was far from unprecedented in an extraordinarily violent, heavily armed country with a veritable tradition of murdered political leaders. Equally alarming was the speed with which the event became the subject of feverish conspiracy theorising, particularly among liberals who normally mock Trump supporters for doing the same thing.

Behold the rise of “BlueAnon” – the Democratic, upscale equivalent of the right’s QAnon conspiracy theories, according to which an elite cabal of child-molesting Satanists has manifested in the Democratic Party and is out to “steal” elections while destroying the “Make America great again” movement. Now, it seems, it is the left who see covert plots everywhere.

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Think through what is being claimed here: that Donald Trump, presumably with an assist from the US secret service and security apparatus, staged a shooting that resulted in the death of at least two people, including the attempted assassin, and that almost lodged a bullet in his own temple – all in order to get a polling boost in an election he was widely predicted to win before the events of 13 July. Such claims are no less absurd than those that say Hillary Clinton runs a paedophile ring.

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The purveyors of these left-coded conspiracy theories laugh at their right-wing counterparts, depicting them as delusional and malignant. And that’s the most depressing dimension of all this. Though one side still claims to be above such behaviour, Americans have reached a point in our national life in which those both sides of the partisan divide immediately resort to spinning conspiracy theories over any historical event.