“Fiction is just as good, maybe better, in the attention economy” The attention economy powers the internet. It made cable news a 24-hour affair. It makes talk radio infotainment. It makes “influencer” a job description. It makes YouTubers money. It makes TokTok TikTok. It makes Trump Trump. It makes us all stupider and more vulnerable to those who would deceive for their own ends. It killed Ashli Babbitt. God knows how A.I. will metastasize the attention economy. We can see it coming and as feel powerless to stop it as we were to learn from its past predations. Michael Kruse interviews Abraham Josephine Riesman on the release of Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America on how professional wrestling has, as someone else observed of the New Age Movement, dissolved external reality. The result in liberal “choose your own spiritual journey” circles was to make conflict impossible, or at least unlikely. The result among black-and-white thinkers is just the opposite. “Garry Kasparov, the Russian freedom activist, has said the point of disinformation isn’t to manipulate the truth, it’s to exhaust your critical thinking,” explained former Republican congressman David Jolly. Reisman traces that devolution of thought to McMahon’s promotion of professional wrestling, itself having roots in traveling circus performances: Kruse: Early in your book, you write: “This is the story about how a country built a man, and how that man reshaped his country. This is a story about evil and its uses, and what you can get away with when you…