If we all went a little nuts during the COVID-19 lockdowns, it’s absolutely true that some of us—including many of our country’s leaders and people in the media—went absolutely batshit crazy, often with disastrous results.

Exactly why that happened is the subject of author Jon Ronson’s latest season of Things Fell Apart, a podcast that explores the deep origins of today’s culture wars in controversies, panics, and delusions from decades ago.

Reason’s Nick Gillespie talked with Ronson about why he believes the creation of a fake medical condition called “excited delirium” in 1988 ultimately led to the death of George Floyd in 2020, how law enforcement fixations on white supremacy warped the investigation into a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and how the director of the massively influential Plandemic documentaries was actually rewriting the script of Star Wars.