Did you leave out the /s? Or are you seriously implying the crazy conspiracy garbage we're seeing recently is a result of COVID? Because that sounds just as deranged as <waves hands at all the other dumb shit on the internet>.
Then there's long COVID. A detailed overview of that.[1] As of late 2023, about 5% of US adults report having long COVID. It appears that, if it lasts a year, there's usually no further recovery.
Some new results indicate that at least some long COVID sufferers still have a reservoir of the active virus.[2] That's encouraging, because antivirals may help them. It indicates where to look.
This is very real. Most people are tired of hearing about COVID, but the virus isn't tired.
[1] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/27756/chapter/8
[2] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/10/getting-to-th...
Think farther back to conspiracy theories that gained wide acceptance in earlier administrations - FEMA concentration camps, Obama isn't a US citizen, 9-11 was an inside job etc. The same patterns of ideation were laid out in Richard Hofstatder's famous essay 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics' which was written in 1964: https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...
...and of course you could trace them farther back through the red scare, the interwar period, the gilded age, post Civil War reconstruction, and the ideas that drove the outbreak of the civil war in the first place.
So while I agree COVID is an exacerbating factor, it's a quantitative rather than a qualitative change.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and
there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism
has been a constant thread winding its way through our
political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion
that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as
your knowledge.'”