Now that the whole Russia Collusion conspiracy theory gussied up by the deep state/Clinton campaign/fake media communities has proved to have been much ado about nothing, there is the question about what comes next? What do all the believers do now that their fantasy lies in ruins?

The answer is obvious, and is practiced by all millennial cults prophesying the end of the world.

You loudly announce that nothing has changed, you patch up the prophecies, and you declare that the world is still going to come to an end, only a bit later than previously forecast.

There is a temptation, for all of us deplorables, to hope that the whole Trump Russia Collusion thing will go away, and the fools and knaves that promoted it will say “my bad” and we can go back to business as usual in America.

But they won’t. That is not how cults work; it is not how politics works. It is not how any human community works. The reason is simple. We humans construct our narratives of meaning out of a selective reading of the facts. This is not scandalous; it is how all living things operate. We select what we believe to be the salient “signal” out of an ocean of “noise” and proceed to use those selected signals as a proxy for reality. Until some salient fact that we had missed hits us over the head.

As usual, my pal Nietzsche nails it. 

[One] takes a group of phenomena as one and calls it a fact… In reality, however, all our doing and knowing is not a succession of facts and empty spaces but a continuous flux… We are… continually misled into imagining things as being simpler than they are[.]

So our CNN/MSNBC/Democratic pals can take a few words out of the Mueller report and say “See? Obstruction of Justice! Onward to Impeachment!”

There is nothing remarkable in this. It is the way that kings down the ages have rallied their troops “once more unto the breach, dear friends.” And so what if they fill up the breach with their woke-ish dead? The show must go on.

But what happens in real life, in the “continuous flux” of life, is that if the glorious vision does not get you to the Promised Land the level of enthusiasm starts to flag; people start falling away from the movement.

Just like in the old saying: old soldiers never die, they merely fade away.

So the true believers won’t ever acknowledge the facts that we deplorables have isolated from the “continuous flux” of the last three years.

They will never confront the fact that the “intelligence community” in the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign and tried to compromise its operatives with Russia Collusion bait.

They will never confront the final truth about Hillary Clinton, the shame of her decision to gussy up a conspiracy theory to excuse her election loss.

They will never see the irony that a party that has clubbed Republicans and conservatives with “McCarthyism” and “reds under the beds” for 60 years should opt for Russian conspiracy when it lost a normal change election.

They will never understand the stunning courage of President Trump to outdare the overwhelming forces -- really the whole ruling class in all its glory -- arrayed against him and his presidency.

They will never understand the monstrous abandonment of centuries-old standards about due process and the presumption of innocence, not to mention the glorious talk about “unreasonable search and seizure.”

But, as the days and weeks and months pass, more and more adherents to the Trump Russia Collusion cult will fall away. They won’t realize that they are demoralized by the failure of their hopes, and they certainly will not admit to the “facts” of the case. And they will certainly never come within a million miles of understanding that the Trump Russia Collusion conspiracy is “worse than Watergate.” Says Karl Notturno at American Greatness:

But the Democrats’ hypocrisy is striking because it is laced with a myopic imprudence that lacks a fundamental understanding of why our system of government is set up the way it is.

They venerate the Supreme Court as an arbiter of morality, not as an arbiter of law. They view the electoral college and the disproportional representation of the Senate as an impediment to democracy, not as a check of smaller states on larger ones. And they view impeachment as a way to reverse a political decision they didn’t like, not as a last resort against a truly despotic leader.

Says he: “Politics exists to settle issues without having to resort to violence.” That is what Supreme Courts and electoral colleges and impeachments are all about.

But you won’t learn about that in the ruling class’s cult of collusion.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.