If there’s one person who’s dominated my headspace throughout the existence of The Postrider, but who I somehow have never written at length about, it’s Tim Robinson. A sketch comedian who began the 2010s with a somewhat unremarkable run as a writer and performer on Saturday  Night Live, Robinson came to most people’s attention in 2019 with the release of I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, a manic, rapid-fire series that explored the absurdity of social mores and people’s inability to live up to them in increasingly deranged bits. Even if you’ve never seen the show, you’re probably familiar with the memes it produced, most notably a frame of Robinson, dressed in a hot dog costume, insisting that “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this” – the “this” in question being driving a hot dog-shaped car into a men’s store. 

I’ve watched most episodes of I Think You Should Leave multiple times, and beyond providing me with a goldmine of quotes I can dip into when conversing with my fellow fans, these repeated viewings have revealed the underlying structure and philosophy of not just the show, but much of Robinson’s other work. Many of the main characters in ITYSL sketches are trying to forestall a sense of embarrassment – from showing up late to a party, from choking in front of a style-icon, or from maybe not being as careful as they should’ve been when they went to the bathroom. In addition to forcing themselves into the convoluted excuse making and accusations that provide much of the show’s jokes, these situations are rooted in a sense of unjustified paranoia. The embarrassments that these characters encounter begin as minor faux pas, but metastasize into “incidents” because they assume that someone – even if they’re a newborn –  is secretly laughing at them, secretly thinks that they’re “a piece of shit.” It’s this projection that leads to their self-destruction – they could have left well-enough alone, but by simultaneously trying to distract from their embarrassment and making it obvious, they end up alienating their peers to the degree that they had initially feared. As someone who has suffered from social anxiety for most of my life, it’s a tendency that I recognize in myself, but I imagine this cycle of cringe is familiar to anyone who’s ever engaged in a social interaction, no matter how outgoing they are.

In 2025, Robinson explored a similar theme in The Chair Company, an HBO series co-created with ITYSL partner Zach Kanin. In The Chair Company, Robinson portrays Ron Trosper, a project manager at a real estate development firm recently tasked with helming the construction of a shopping mall in Canton, Ohio. At a company event announcing the project, Ron sits on a chair that immediately crumbles, not only embarrassing him in front of his colleagues but also prompting an HR investigation after his supine state leads him to accidentally look up a coworker’s skirt. In true Robinson fashion, Ron refuses to take this incident, uh, lying down. Instead, he decides that someone must have rigged the chair to embarrass him, and decides to dive deep into Tecca, its manufacturer. Eventually, this investigation becomes an obsession, drawing Ron into a complicated web of shady figures and shell companies with ties to local politicians and business interests, and damaging his relationship with both his family and his employer in the process. 

At first blush, this is a classic Robinson set up – a guy experiences an ultimately inconsequential embarrassment, and then dedicates most of his waking hours to proving that this wasn’t the result of mere chance, but a plot to bring him down. In most ITYSL sketches, this obsession is unjustified – the truly embarrassing thing is not the inciting incident, but the character’s increasingly desperate attempts to either erase or justify it. But at the end of The Chair Company’s first episode, things take a turn. Leaving the office after a long day of work, Ron is pushed up against his car by a man wielding a tire iron. “Stop looking into the chair company,” the figure threatens, before bashing Ron over the head. In an instant, our expectations are subverted, and Ron’s paranoia is justified. He isn’t crazy. There actually is a conspiracy afoot. And whoever’s running it is clearly out to get him. 

It’s Not Disinfo If You Believe It

Paranoia, and discussions of paranoia, are some of the defining aspects of the Trump era. The current president’s rise to power was largely fueled by populist resentment of cultural and economic elites, a resentment that often curdled into far-fetched conspiracy theories that had real world consequences. This conspiracy theorizing became one of the Republican Party’s guiding principles in the aftermath of Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020, fueling the January 6th riot and various, unsubstantiated claims that the election was somehow “stolen.” This only intensified discussions of “misinformation” and the ways to combat it, so much so that the Biden administration created the short-lived “Disinformation Governance Board” to combat hostile nations’ attempts to muddy the American political discourse. This office folded after three months, thanks in part to the foggy nature of its adversary (who, exactly, should determine what does and does not qualify as “disinformation?”) and First Amendment concerns (when does a sincerely held but incorrect statement become a threat?), but the recent proliferation of AI-generated content and Trump’s second reelection campaign’s indulgences in unverified claims about Haitian migrants eating pets kept concerns about the phenomenon alive. 

For most of the past decade or so, misinformation, paranoia, and conspiracy theorizing has been framed as a right wing problem. This positioning can be traced back to the “birther” movement, in which certain conservative figures (including our current president) peddled the lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and, therefore, not eligible to be president (a similar, but less organized, claim insisted that Obama was also a Muslim), and seemed to have reached its apex with the “Pizzagate” conspiracy regarding a Democratic donor and pedophilia. Social media accounts like QAnon kept conspiracies alive even after Trump was sworn in, and the president’s desire to simultaneously downplay the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic and court vaccine-skeptical voters kicked theorizing into high gear, undercutting one of the first Trump administration’s true policy successes, and culminating in the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who, through his crusade against safe and effective vaccines, is essentially turning decades of debunked conspiracy theorizing into official government policy. 

This growing awareness of right wing paranoia was reflected in American media as well. In journalism, this embodied itself in dozens of articles about loved ones “lost” to the delusions peddled by QAnon and reporting about the ways that foreign powers like Russia have tried to curry influence and spread disinformation through social media and online influencers. Even though the notion that Americans were being manipulated by foreign actors who may or may not have had ties to one of the country’s two major parties would seem to validate the conspiracy theories of one end of the political spectrum, this focus on misinformation also fed into the idea that the most far flung and sinister conclusions people were reaching about the government were more smoke than fire. Yes, your uncle’s brain may have been deliberately fried by a super PAC or a Russian cyberwarrior, but the kinds of things they made him believe – a shadowy cabal of pedophiles controlling everything, a secret shadow government answering only to Obama and/or the Clintons – were so far fetched that they were self-invalidating. Propaganda has existed for as long as politics have; the issue, it seemed, was not that people were believing crazy ideas, but that these ideas were being disseminated via mediums that were harder to regulate. In other words, what these people believed wasn’t focused on – how they were coming to these beliefs was, and the image of basement-cloistered incel, Fox News-addicted grandpa, or wine-drunk MAGA mom warping their minds through a series of far right podcasts, YouTube channels, and forums became an archetype of the American political imagination.  

But towards the end of the Biden administration, things began to turn. Sound of Freedom, a thriller produced by conservative production company Angel Studios for $14.5 million, became a runaway box office hit to the tune of $251 million. Inspired by the exploits of anti-sex trafficking activist Tim Ballard, the film played to one of the most pervasive fears of both the right and the extremely online writ large – namely, that your child was at risk of being kidnapped by a sex trafficker at any place, at any time, and that the government wasn’t doing enough to combat it. It turns out Ballard may have embellished some of his accomplishments, and that his trips to Mexico, ostensibly meant to break up these trafficking rings, may have been used as a pretense for him to engage in some alleged sexual exploitation of his own – but nonetheless, the Sound of Freedom’s success indicated that there was an appetite for movies that took these concerns, often dismissed by journalists and the cultural elite, seriously. 

Alternative Facts Go Mainstream

In 2024, David Ayer’s The Beekeeper played into similar fears, but focused its aim on a broader audience. A gonzo action film, The Beekeeper sees a retired government operative (Jason Statham) engage on a campaign of revenge after his elderly employer/landlord commits suicide after being caught up in a phone phising scam. As he works up the ladder of the organization that’s running these scams, he makes a chilling discovery – the ringleader is none other than Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson), the drug addicted son of the President of the United States (Jemma Redgrave).

History is replete with movies about vigilantes who uncover such plots, but Adam Clay, The Beekeeper’s hero’s, single minded determination to not just take down the president’s son, but even consider murdering the president herself (bees, we’re told, will kill a queen who produces defective offspring), makes it one of the rare mainstream films that seems to be openly courting a QAnon-adjacent fanbase. The parallels between Derek, who is also revealed to have rigged the election in his mother’s favor, and Hunter Biden are unmistakable, as are the ways the film flirts with many right wing conspiracy theories; making the film, as I’ve argued before, a quintessential look at the late Biden era. Movies about lone gunmen determined to fix an ailing society are nothing new, but in 70s classics like Taxi Driver and Joe, these characters are often portrayed as deeply disturbed, deeply bigoted, or both. But in The Beekeeper, Clay is more or less presented as a hero, while the government forces that are tracking him are either incompetent, corrupt, or both. That he ends the film with the supersoldier equivalent of riding off into the sunset (donning scuba gear and swimming away from the president’s seaside mansion) only serves to add a sheen of classic, if not hardened, Americana (in 2025, Ayer and Statham would team up again for A Working Man, a human trafficking thriller of their own that has put them on the path to becoming the Michael Winner and Charles Bronson of the Trump era).

Now, sitting here at the end of the first year of Donald Trump’s second term, even the left-leaning and mainstream corners of pop culture seem to be coming around to the idea that there might, in fact, be something far-reaching and sinister going on at the highest levels of government. The most obvious example is Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, perhaps the most universally praised film of the year and, in the minds of many prognosticators, the clear front runner for Best Picture. The film’s protagonist, Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), is a washed up leftist revolutionary who spends his days getting high and watching The Battle of Algiers and might initially come off as the inverted version of the kind of right wing paranoiacs that we all became familiar with during the Trump 1.0 and Biden eras. But even though he confesses to have fried his brain with drugs and alcohol for most of his adult life, we find out that the strict rules he places on his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) are rooted in something rational – the French 75, Ferguson’s old militia group, was systematically picked off by Steven J. Lockjaw, the commander of an internal security force who also had a sexual fixation of Ferguson’s then-wife, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) who, it turns out, following her capture in a botched bank robbery, sold out the rest of the French 75 to save herself. 16 years later, Lockjaw reappears in Bob and Willa’s life – not merely to execute his revenge, but because he believes the biracial Willa might actually be his daughter, instead – a fact that would complicate his efforts to join the Christmas Adventurers, a secret white supremacist group composed of powerful politicians and business leaders. The scenes that follow have become chillingly familiar in 2025: masked and armed law enforcement officers sweep a California city looking to apprehend undocumented immigrants, and are met with a protest in response; armed agents storm a school; U.S. citizens are detained, interrogated, and threatened. There is suddenly a creeping sense that the government is no longer an institution regulated by the social contract, but an occupying force.

All of this would be a disturbing enough reflection of reality, but the Freudian motivations of Lockjaw and the false flag tactics employed by his forces make things simultaneously darker and more ridiculous. A protest against an immigration raid that was launched as a cover for Lockjaw’s pursuit of Willa turns into a riot when the authorities call in “Eddie Van Halen” – a masked “protestor” in a Van Halen t-shirt who leaves a government van, sneaks his way into the ranks of the protestors, and throws a Molotov cocktail at police, triggering a riot that acts as a further smokescreen for Lockjaw’s actions. The implication of One Battle After Another isn’t just that we should fear our increasingly authoritarian government – it’s that the figures that control the levers of power aren’t compelled by ideology, but by their basest fears and desires and petty vendettas. Even the name of the Christmas Adventurers themselves implies a sort of childishness, as does the “gee whiz” nature of their dialogue. But as anyone who’s been near an angry five-year-old knows, children are more than capable of being destructive – and if they had the full thrust of the security state behind them, we’d think twice about owning a cell phone like Bob Ferguson, too. 

Released earlier in the year, Ari Aster’s polarizing Eddington pulls from an even more complicated web of conspiracy theories, and how they permeate throughout both the highest reaches of power and the lowest corners of society. Taking place in rural (and fictional) Eddington, New Mexico, the film begins by depicting the rivalry between Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who are butting heads over the latter’s enforcement of the state government’s COVID protocols. In Eddington, the influence of conspiracy theories is more literal – Cross’ mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) spends her days reading and watching Alex Jones-style content, imploring her son-in-law to exercise his authority and fight back against the mandates. When he decides to run against Garcia for mayor, Cross, who’s more conflicted about these radical positions than Dawn, begins to court true believers towards his campaign. But much like Lockjaw, Cross’ goals are more than just political – he’s trying to impress his troubled wife, Louise (Emma Stone) and convince her that they should have a baby. As in One Battle After Another, the ethical boundaries that Cross ends up crossing (no pun intended) are the result of personal feelings of shame and inadequacy, not deeply held political beliefs. 

The irony of the film is that this leads Cross to become both a perpetrator and a victim of a conspiracy himself. In a COVID-induced haze and coping with the departure of his wife, who falls under the sway of a Svengali-like figure played by Austin Butler, Cross assassinates Garcia and his son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) in their home, but stages the scene to make it look like it was carried out by Antifa operatives. With Cross being the only candidate left in the mayoral race, a company that wants to construct a data center in Eddington that he opposes sends their own Antifa-disguised operatives into town to kill him. They’re only stopped by the actions of Brian (Cameron Mann), a friend of Eric’s who had been involved in Black Lives Matter protests in order to impress Sarah (Amelie Hoeferle). But, the newfound fame he gains from killing Antifa supersoldiers leads to him becoming a successful right wing influencer and fulfilling his goal of falling in love and gaining notoriety. Cross is paralyzed and brain damaged in the attack, but is elected mayor anyway, becoming a tool of his mother-in-law, who herself appears to be on the payroll of the data center company. Like One Battle After Another, Eddington identifies the true motives of political actors to be more base and personally interested than ideological. But whereas Anderson’s film sees the psycho-sexual urges of Lockjaw and, to a certain extent, Bob Ferguson and Perfidia Beverly Hills, as the root of all conflict, Eddington portrays an even vaster conspiracy of corporate interests as the beneficiaries of this personal jockeying for position. Whether left, right, or center, the fears and desires of the citizens of Eddington are being used by forces beyond their perception to achieve the end of corporate domination – an expression of the “uniparty” accusations that were embraced by populist elements of both parties beginning in the 2016 primaries. 

Perhaps the most unconventional, and simultaneously most poignant, expression of this new, justified paranoia comes in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia. A remake of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia sees Jesse Plemons play Teddy Gatz, an Amazon warehouse employee who’s become convinced that aliens are responsible for the destruction of his rural community, colony collapse disorder among honeybees, and his mother’s health issues and subsequent coma. Isolated in his cluttered family home with his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), Teddy chemically castrates himself and devises a plot to kidnap pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), who he’s convinced is an “Andromedan” alien working on behalf on an intergalactic empire. He and Don capture Fuller, shave her head, and torture her in their basement, trying to extract information about the Andromedan plot while she insists that she’s innocent. 

On the surface, Bugonia looks like the prototypical anti-paranoia film from the early Trump and Biden eras. A resentful white male shut-in kidnaps a powerful woman who he blames for his and his family’s failures, demanding to find a simple explanation for the systemic factors that have left him poor and unfulfilled. Fuller tries to make a point to this effect about Teddy, but he cuts her off. “I know exactly what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that I’m in some kind of Internet-induced autohypnotic feedback loop, and-and gatekeepers, and-and norms, and all that weak hegemonic horseshit,” before telling her that he’s tried his hand at being “alt-right, alt-lite, leftist, Marxist,” but that all of these political labels have left him wanting. In fact, he’s proudly post-politics, declaring that “99.9% percent of what’s called activism is really personal exhibitionism and brand maintenance in disguise” – a surprisingly direct thesis of the point that Eddington was trying to get at. 

But where Bugonia zags is by showing that Teddy, who’s also revealed to have killed multiple people while searching for Andromedans, is actually right. Fuller is an Andromedan, and the alien race has been secretly manipulating human society for years, trying to guide them away from their destructive tendencies and create a peaceful planet (which is revealed, in the end, to be flat). Teddy, an angry, rural white male – the very archetype who has been painted as the driving force of populist right backlash – is vindicated. And after his death (which comes in a botched attempt to suicide bomb the Andromendans’ mothership), the Andromedans decide to pull the plug on humanity after they deem their grand experiment a failure. While the implicit message that we should be concerned about government conspiracies in One Battle After Another, Eddington, and even The Chair Company marks a break from recent trends in conspiracy-related discourse, Bugonia takes things one step further by suggesting the very people who we’ve been told by legacy media outlets, think tanks, and scholars are at the root of our fractured, post-truth moment may, in fact, be on to something after all. 

This sense of vindicated paranoia – that the only rational response to our current world is to constantly looking over your own shoulder – isn’t merely limited to film and television, either. On his record GOLLIWOG, rapper billy woods captures this sense of unease brilliantly. Sometimes, he’s trying to escape the danger – on “Waterproof Mascara,” he discusses the aftermath of his abusive father’s death as if it were the prelude to a spy thriller. “Mom showed us where the she kept passports hid,” he raps over a ghostly sample and the sound of a woman crying, as he describes how even familial relations aren’t a good enough barometer of trustworthiness. “The king’s dead and your uncles are not your friends.”/How many times I gotta tell you kids?”/”It’s us in this room, that’s it.” Other times, as on “STAR87,” he acknowledges, that, he, himself, is the danger (“Phone ring off the hook”/”They wanna know where the bodies is hid”), and lurking closer than you realize – ending with When a Stranger Calls’ iconic line about a stalker’s phone call “coming from inside the house.” 

Don’t Trust Anyone

And that, ultimately, is what this wave of new paranoid media is about. For the past decade or so, conspiracies were portrayed as something happening to us – either deliberately stoked by bad actors (in last year’s Superman film, Lex Luthor employs an army of rageful monkeys to bash out hateful tweets about the Man of Steel) or the products of a disordered mind. But to be an American in 2025 is to live under a government controlled by conspiracy theorists – which, in a vicious cycle, necessitates that we all become conspiracy theorists ourselves. 

Now, even the truest believers in America’s institutions cannot help but search for the ulterior motive in each rash decision, to the point where some of those who once subscribed wholeheartedly to Trump’s skewed version of reality have found themselves questioning his motives as his policies seem to increasingly geared towards revenge and personal preservation rather than a coherent vision what society should look like. And whether we’re at school, church, or work, we find ourselves looking over our shoulder, expecting that, at any moment, a masked man could come and take us away. Because even though they haven’t come for you yet, there’s no reason to believe that they won’t find a reason to soon.