It was 2000 and George W. Bush had just selected Dick Cheney to be his VP.  I heard a commentator say how it was a great pick for Bush, as Cheney added "gravitas" to the ticket.  I had never heard that word before, but its meaning was clear from the context and from my rudimentary exposure to Latin, and I thought "what a great word to use for the situation."  Apparently others thought so too, as there was an explosion of commentators using the same word to describe Bush's choice.  It was absolutely comical.  But the part of my brain that is made of tin foil began to tingle.  Still, the more mainstream part of my brain chalked it up to other commentators admiring the use of the word, too, and thinking they could look smarter if they used it in their own commentary.  A kind of homage to the original heavy hitter commentator (I don't remember who it was), or a minor plagiarism that could never be proven.  But it ruined the word for me.

Over the years, that same tin foil part of my brain would be activated repeatedly, to the point where I could no longer just brush it off.  Something was definitely going on.  And then, last summer, it started to not just tingle, but to actually burn.  The occasion was before Biden's fateful debate with Trump.  If you will recall, before the debate, there was a deluge of left-leaning commentators, all using virtually identical language, trying to convince us of how Biden was "sharp as a tack."  You can easily find YouTube montages that go on for 10 minutes with commentators all using that exact phrase or variations of it, to describe Biden's mental acuity.

And then the debate happened.  I watched the debate, and I guess my expectations of Biden's performance were so low that I thought he actually did pretty well.  But instantly, EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. of those same left-leaning commentators turned on him and said how shockingly badly he had done.  So badly that the Democrats would probably have to replace him.  It was like Biden had been set up to fail, and a memo went out with the new party line, and they all got with the program.  The 2 minutes of hate was extended to weeks, until all the pieces of the plan fell into place.

I'm NOT saying there is some conspiracy about these wildfires.  The tin foil part of my brain is very quiet on this.  It's just that when I do see the same unusual phraseology being used by multiple news sources, or the same mistaken use of a word, my tin foil lobe tingles at least for a moment.