How the party of Lincoln became the party of Alex Jones

At a news conference held in the hours after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, a man asked then-Gov. Deval Patrick whether the attacks had been carried out by the US government as part of a plot to clamp down on civil liberties. The governor, who had spent the day scrambling to respond to the crisis and begin coordinating the search for the perpetrators, dismissed the question with a quick “no.”