The MAGA misinformation-industrial complex has gathered steam since 2020. Here’s how

(CNN) —If I was trying to blend in, it wasn’t working.It was October 2020 – the height of Covid – and I was one of the only people wearing a facemask at a meeting in a drab windowless hotel conference room in Scottsdale, Arizona.One attendee, dressed in some kind of elaborate costume, directed a disapproving grunt my way.We listened as speaker after speaker explained that Trump was certain to win the 2020 presidential election – then just weeks away – in a landslide. Anything less would be a sign the Democrats had cheated.If that happened, warned a man from the podium, we may need to take matters into our own hands. Political violence, he argued, wasn’t all that bad – American history had been shaped by it after all.A little more than two months later that man would take part in an attack on the US Capitol. He is now serving an 11-year prison sentence.The other man – the one in costume who had grunted – would soon achieve global infamy. His painted face, and his headpiece made of animal horns, would land him on the cover of newspapers all around the world. We’d all come to know him as...