Mark Fisher

No, that was a new one on me, but he's got a bunch of them and he's got a whole book of them in his book, Government Gangsters.

There came a moment in that very same interview between Rogan and Patel where Rogan was almost teasing Patel about the fact that he's prone to these conspiracy theories and

And that he sees the government and the press and politicians as part of this cabal that is out to undermine Trump and undermine the MAGA movement.

And Rogan kind of poked him and said, we love conspiracies, don't we?

They're exciting.

And Patel kind of laughed and said, yeah, they're our thing.

There's a certain constancy to the way in which Trump and Patel think, the way in which they tell stories about their administration's actions.

They both are given to dramatic tellings of somewhat fanciful notions about what our enemies are up to and what is motivating them.

And they both jump off from some actual facts.

Fentanyl is obviously a scourge.

It's obviously an enormous problem.

It comes in from Mexico, but its component parts are frequently manufactured in China.

So there's a legitimate issue there.

Is it a legitimate crime-fighting imperative for the FBI?

That's the fact part.

And then we get into the fanciful as we hear Patel spin out his notion of why this might be happening.

It's very reminiscent of the way Donald Trump frequently portrays issues not just in Venezuela but around the world today.

where he sees or is told about some situation, presents the germ of the facts, and then extrapolates from there, exaggerates and throws in numbers that can't quite be verified and so on.

It all boils down to the show.

Both Trump and Patel, very similar personalities in certain important ways, one of which is that they think of every day in their job as the next act in a long-running show