I don't disagree that just about any regulation of these groups will be interpreted as more conspiracy.

I guess the crux of my argument is that these people are the victims of psychological warfare. I'm not throwing out the word brainwashing for emphasis, but I truly believe a lot of these people are actually brainwashed. To give context, I don't believe its controversial at all to say that boot camp in the American armed forces, and most assuredly other countries as well, is brainwashing, through and through. Put people in a prolonged state of stress. After sufficient time, tell these people you can end all of the stress if they just follow your directions. Run till you puke. Have trained soldiers screaming in your face. Be woken at all times of the night to both run till you puke and have trained soldiers scream in your face.

Instead, many conservatives in America have been fed a constant diet of outrage/dopamine cycles about how evil Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and anyone associated, are. They're given 30,000 emails to peruse that are eventually framed to "unveil" a pedophile ring tied to all of the current players in the democratic establishment.

Then most importantly, a billionaire with no political experience, no political capital to lose, whatsoever, comes along and trolls, and proves wrong, nearly the entire national media for over a year. Nearly every week, he makes some offensive remark that leads every veteran of any election anywhere to believe he has committed political suicide. Thus, a year and a half of reporting that Trump will soon quit the race, and has no chance to win. But since, unlike all of those previous politicians, Trump has no "betters" to please, no one in American politics had anything with which to pressure Trump to do anything he didn't want to do. So when Trump won the election, the brain washing was complete. Trump had lead them out of the "prolonged stress" of Barack Obama's 8 years, and the year and a half long prospect of Hillary Clinton being President for 4 years after that. Everything he said about the lying media turned out to be "correct". Witnessing Trump win under the unique circumstances in which he won has had the psychological effect of making him a nearly god like figure in the eyes of his base. He has cut through political correctness, sexual assault claims, ethics concerns, taken his red meat to the supreme court and won. In the eyes of someone already inclined to pull for they guy on their side, Donald Trump became nothing short of Luke Skywalker. If you think this is hyperbole, heres another example of how people can be brainwashed by witnessing uncanny success against all odds, especially when that success stands to improve the brainwashed's lives immediately.

There is a known email scam where the scammer emails a sufficiently large enough pool of marks, the winning team for a single National Football League game every week, ahead of the game, so the marks can bet on the game. Every week (out of 16), the scammer simply takes the group of people who "won" the previous weeks game, and splits them in half, telling half that team A will win, and half that Team B will win. Obviously, no one will listen to someone who picks losers, so assume that every week, half of the marks leave the scam. If the pool is sufficiently large, (only 32768) after 15 weeks, there will still be marks who have been given the winning team ahead of time, for 15 consecutive weeks by some anonymous stranger. It's not controversial to see why those marks may have been brainwashed by the process, and would be willing to pay large sums of money for that 16th pick.

Obviously, Donald Trump didn't run this scam, but it goes to show that people can be casual observers to information, and be presented with just the right information to be essentially brainwashed.