During the 2010 campaign, when the Tea Party was running strong by peddling a toxic brew of anti-government sentiment and right-wing paranoia (Death panels! Concentration camps! A secret Muslim, born-in-Kenya, socialist radical in the White House!), I surveyed the political landscape to identify what was the most alarming race of those midterm elections. There were plenty of kooks running for the House and Senate that year. But I settled on the Kentucky Senate contest, where the Republican Party’s nominee, Rand Paul, a libertarian far-right activist and ophthalmologist who had never held elected office, was running against the Jack Conway, the Democratic state attorney general. Paul was a Tea Party champion who had appeared frequently on the talk show of Alex Jones, the noxious conspiracy theory conman, and who had spouted his own libertarian and conspiratorial nonsense. He flirted with 9/11 trutherism and claimed Democrats wanted to create an army of “armed EPA agents” who would burst into homes and apartments to determine if they were meeting energy-efficiency standards. He insisted there should be no federal regulation of any industry—that is, no health, safety, or environmental standards. “If he wins,” I wrote, “it will signal the power of know-nothing Tea Partyism.” I dubbed the Paul-Conway face-off the most important Senate race of the year. The election of Paul to the Senate would mean any right-wing, conspiracy-hawking buffoon could become a national leader. It would open the door to other kooks. This contest was a true bellwether.