This was the year that the far left and the alt right began merging. Julian Assange and Alex Jones are now on the same side. The outer fringe of the Bernie Sanders movement mixed with the Alt Right too. And Trump is still reaching out to Bernie voters, convinced he believes what they believe. The mainstream media has missed nearly all of this, being that they do almost all of their social networking on Twitter, while this strange new paranoid blend is strictly Facebook. Strange it is, too, ideologically completely mystifying and free of the entire left vs right spectrum that has been in place for over a century. This is all new, and it will only get weirder and weirder. Thus, Julian Assange is convinced that Hillary intends to kill him with a drone strike….news he probably saw first somewhere in the Breitbart universe, and believed completely.

This is the first time you have ever had the Far Left and Far Right come together. It is the beginning of new ideologies. The internet has released us from conventional political philosophies and reality, and allowed us to believe anything we want. Paranoia reigns supreme in this new digital universe, as paranoia always does in new places. Millions of years of evolution as prey make us fearful in unexplored territory. There are predators everywhere, enemies, unseen threats, and they are watching us, waiting to pounce. We interact online with bared teeth the way we never do in person. It is all so high tech yet all so primordially fearful and hostile. It will take a long time for calm to prevail on the internet, long, long, long past our lifetimes. We will have to evolve into creatures able to think and act calmly online. We are hardwired to be hostile and paranoid there. It is our default position. As politics is subsumed by the internet, it can only get mean and scary. There’s nothing to keep it from getting meaner and scarier. 2016 might be only a taste. 2020 could get really weird.