By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

Rarely has my heart raced so fast in a movie. Eddington (2025) is nuts. Brilliantly crazy. Beyond belief. Beyond words. It might be the most politically and culturally realistic film I've ever seen.

It is particularly gripping because it deals with a madness that everyone tries to forget but which we dare not. It covers the strange period of the Spring and Summer of 2020, times that will go down in history. This is about as good a presentation of historical fiction as one can expect.

It is set in a small town in New Mexico and centers on the conflict between the mayor and the county sheriff. The mayor is a cheesy version of a type of upwardly mobile politician we know all too well. He is a small-fry version of Gavin Newsom or Justin Trudeau, always media ready, deeply hypocritical, polished in presentation, and gassy with cliches about equality, safety, compliance, and science. Covid was his opportunity.

The sheriff, in contrast, is old school and doubts all the protocols. It strikes him as tyranny based on nothing, especially since the state was mandating all sorts of insane protocols even though the virus had not reached the area. He resists at every turn and then decides to run for mayor himself.

Though it is fiction, the town in question could be anywhere in that part of the country. A similar drama played out in every small town. These people watched on TV what was happening in New York City and figured it had nothing to do with them. But then the state and county health officials got involved and mandated extreme controls over the whole population.

All the themes of this period make an appearance here. We have mask conflicts. One-way grocery aisles. Capacity restrictions that force people to line up outside the store. Social distancing. Hydroxychloroquine. School and business closures. Event 201. Stay-at-home orders. SSRIs, liquor, and pot. Social media everywhere. Christian nationalism. Antifa. Epstein. World Economic Forum. Fauci. Gates. A Big-Tech data center with a wind farm.

It's all here, a crazy mixed-up melange of insanity, paranoia, accusation, and anger. It is also a powder keg.

The next steps everyone remembers. Attached to phones and laptops, people dug around for the real story since the fake one was so obviously ridiculous. New influencers pop up. They push wild theories that grow more extreme by the day. QAnon appears and draws in converts. Stressed and confused, everyone seems to be yelling at everyone.

And yet, the community is far from unified in incredulity. There is a scene in the desert where the kids have escaped the home to socialize with beers, courting, and antics. But even here - and this is highly realistic - the kids are distancing themselves, maintaining six feet and wearing masks. They could not stand another day sitting on the bed at home but they were not ready to believe that the whole thing was a hoax.

In another case, a nice man wanted to buy groceries but is not allowed in the store because he would not put on a mask. When he is kicked out, the many other compliant customers briefly clap that he is gone.

I swear that I saw this exact scene unfold many times. It happened to me on multiple occasions. I, like most everyone, can fill up evenings with stories.

Once while walking outside without a mask, a man screamed at me that masks are "socially recommended." Those words continue to ring in my head partially because I don't know what that means but actually I do know what it means: a Red Guard of Covid extremists had arisen among us.

It gets nuttier. Just as it seems things could not be more broken, there was George Floyd, a black man killed by the police that made the headlines and inspired a new movement. The kids were desperate to get out. Angry and itching for some scapegoat, it somehow transpired that the target became "whiteness." The kids were ready to preach the doctrine, which was all about self-hate and cultivating the desire for se...