Almost no one in the mainstream press has come to terms with what it means to have one of our two main political parties based on feral disinformation.

Just to get this out of the way, there are certainly false beliefs that are common among democrats/progressives/ liberals. The far left is a whole 'nother story but they don't have that much say in the party despite what Fox News would like you to believe.
 

For example:

The primary cause of Western mega-fires is not climate change. Most coastal cities will not soon be underwater due to rising sea levels. These are not whole cloth falsehoods. Climate change certainly exacerbates my region's forest fires and greatly complicates our ability to tackle them. Rising oceans are likely to submerge a handful of very low lying cities such as Miami Beach and, more importantly, can make storm swells all the more deadly for many coastal cities.

Yes, most Democrats hold these incorrect or at least insufficiently nuanced beliefs, but while it is important that everyone try to do better when it comes to misinformation, the disinformation problem on the right is an entirely different beast in terms of magnitude, type, causes, and potential for damage, and as far as I can tell, few researchers and almost no analyst with any major news organization has fully faced this problem and thought through its implications.

Just to review, what we've been calling feral disinformation started out as propaganda, conspiracy theories, and other false beliefs that were originally promoted or at least tolerated by the conservative movement because it helped advance their objectives, but this disinformation took on a life of its own. To put it bluntly, feral disinformation along with the desire to "own the lib"s define the Republican Party of the 2020s.

Almost all GOP voters base their political positions at least in part on some example of feral disinformation.

Certain false beliefs and conspiracy theories are so widely held in the party that no candidate can hope to be nominated without at the very least turning a blind eye. If you make evidence-based claims about vaccinations, the 2020 elections, or the lack of any support for conspiracy theories about prominent Democrats part of your platform, you are unlikely to have any hope of a career in the Republican Party beyond the district level.

Not only is feral disinformation found among a large majority of Republican voters, completely delusional variants are held by a disturbingly large minority, often including disturbingly highly placed and influential figures. Fantastic theories about vaccines spreading through casual contact or even genetically modified mosquitoes, futuristic life extending technologies keeping long dead politicians secretly alive, satanic cannibal cults of the elite, Protocols of Zion style Jewish conspiracies, rejected X-Files plots about aliens and subterranean lizard people, and of course flat earthers. While the typical Republican probably doesn't believe any of these things, taken together, the believers do represent a large enough group to have real impact in the party.

This is the reality that everyone who works in politics, either directly or as a journalist or as a researcher, has got to face up to. If you're looking at DeSantis's support, you pretty much have to start with anti-vaxxers. If you want to explain the ratcheting of more extreme and unpopular anti-abortion laws, you have to factor in urban myths about infanticide and and other child endangerment fantasies.

Trump: “Under Roe v Wade, they could execute the baby at any time.” pic.twitter.com/p9xQCwFrhB

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 7, 2023

2,000 Mules has more to do with Trump's hold on the party than do any variables political scientists would normally put into their models. 

At this point, trying to understand the GOP without considering the role of feral disinformation is like trying to explain the witch mania without considering the belief in the supernatural.