I really think PizzaGate was the turning point

 It the thing that started with hard evidence that there were some very fishy things going in at the DNC, finally documented and giving credence to suspicious campaign activity leading up to it,but then it spun off into fantasy territory and unproven claims when too many people became obsessed with it. 

And I think people became obsessed because they had Hillary supporters, who refused to look at the emails, insisting there was nothing there at all. Then it became clear to people who had read WikiLeaks that there was a coordinated effort by MSM to squash the story when they all started using the same phrases and calling it all baseless. We saw the DNC trying to crush any journalist that didn't go along with that. Remember that guy Ben Swann, who suddenly left the air after merely stating the truth, that the situation had never even been investigated, so why were people insisting PizzaGate claims were baseless.

There was that Seaman guy who got all into it and had weird stuff happen. There were other You Tubers and independent journalists we started following. Who was that guy we watched several times a week who was living in hotels and funding his own investigation and reporting? Whatever happened to him?

Anyway, it seemed like after that a lot of progressives became very suspicion of everything, and all we knew was the Dems were lying about a lot of things, being very sneaky,  attempting to manipulate public perception, appearing to threaten people, and definitely colluding with or coordinating MSM. A bunch of people went Green after that, or Libertarian, because they didn't feel aligned with Trump, but just couldn't stomach Democrats anymore. Some turned in Bernie and started that meme about Bernie being controlled opposition just because he took the position that Hillary was the lesser of two evils.

 There was a definitely divide between left, right, and independents and greens for a while there, a long while. But some began shifting right, and stayed mired in conspiracy theory. It was as if they'd become trapped in the very web they were seeking to expose because some of that web had threads that were thin but really sticky. And by sticky I mean tantalizingly because of their sordidness. All kinds of extraneous things started getting pulled into the mix and confused it all. But there were a lot of people saw that mass of confusion as smoke that had to have a fire behind in somewhere, and they determined to find and expose it.

That's when everything started to go to hell, and that's when Trump realized he could take advantage of that confusion, hop on the conspiracy theory train, act as though he was the master of exposing and taking down a shady shadow government, and increase his base by doing so.