Question [dubious] Authority, before THEY question you

I try to avoid this sort of "Oh my GOD! We're moving towards a fascist state!" rhetoric, but when you read about cases like this, where a deluded whackjob is able to ruin peoples' lives for several months, you have to start asking when people are going to tell self-proclaimed "authorities" to go f*ck themselves:

Busts began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, "a meth capital of the United States," the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.

Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood, from television mainly, to be the law.

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as "Sergeant Bill," boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.

But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald's anti-drug campaign abruptly unraveled after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding-performing minister, a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.

Mr. Jakob, 36, is now the subject of a criminal investigation by federal authorities, and is likely to face charges related to impersonating a law enforcement officer, his lawyer said.

Okay, read that part again. Slowly.

Someone shows up in town who "went to great lengths to make police officers think he was a federal agent", and was eagerly given effective proconsular powers to crush the evildoers in this methamphetamine capital of the United States . . . Gerald, MO. I'm not the greatest geography whiz about the US, but I had to zoom out five times on Google Maps before I found a town in the area I'd ever heard of before¹. We're talking "BF Nowhere" here.

That a place like that can be subject to the kind of mass delusion that allows "Witchsmellers" to arise and be given power is very disheartening. How many others have played this part for credulous audiences? I'd bet there are many, most of whom won't ever be forced to admit that they were fooled by con-artists.

¹ For the record, it was Fulton, Mo., and I'd only ever heard of it because that was where Churchill made his famous reference to the "Iron Curtain" in a speech there in 1946.