It's not just people's imaginative need to have the world be stranger than it is. It's that people can't imagine themselves in particular (ordinary people driving cars) as the threat and want to imagine scary monster people.

‘need to imagine the world stranger than it is’. Golden.

Or like, ‘need to imagine other people as unlike oneself: tired (they’re not), mostly self-centred (they obsess about others), robustly non-ill-intentioned toward others (flip to pure malevolence easily), basically transparent (they hide)’

“Corn refers to all grains” and “Americans frequently forget that” are the two Corn Laws

It’s like, Trump dumping on elections, it was feared, would lower turnout b/c some would actually distrust democracy and not just pretend to.

It’s so complicated to say ‘they vote in dem elections b/c they distrust dem elections and they are voting for people they understand will end elections, though no one says any of this. Distrust of, say, FBI, or immigration, that’s actually distrust of democracy.’