“Like Ar-Arg-maginnon.” 

Such was the apocalyptic pronouncement of Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, attempting to quote a sensationalist headline from the Los Angeles Times in her opening statement before Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s testimony to the committee.

It captured the general mood of the Democrats’ questioning today, which was eerily reminiscent of the Judiciary Committee’s theatrical grilling of Bill Barr the other week. Some of the less aggressive interrogators simply accused DeJoy of incompetence and suggested he ought to resign. But the more ambitious ones accused him of complicity in Donald Trump’s nefarious plot to steal the election by slowing down the mail, and hinted at harsher penalties than resignation.

Stephen Lynch (D-MA), with his characteristic sledgehammer subtlety, reminded the postmaster general that he used to be a blue collar worker before inexplicably screaming his entire line of questioning. That’s not an exaggeration—watch the tirade here. Lynch, who faces a primary challenge from the left this fall, snagged some valuable media coverage with this bit of melodrama. This coverage isn’t just valuable to Lynch, who needs to cast himself as a hardline anti-Trumper if he’s going to fend off accusations of moderation in the coming months. It also helps progressives in politics and media to bolster their fantastical claims about the Great USPS Conspiracy of 2020.

Just how detached those claims are from reality is betrayed by the specifics of Lynch’s questioning. His big question was “Will you put the machines back?” referring to high-speed sorting machines which—as DeJoy quickly pointed out—had been slated for removal long before any concerns had been raised about the election. I’d say Lynch was making a mountain out of a molehill, but there’s not even a molehill there to start with.

After multiple notices that his time had expired, Mr. Lynch slipped one last shout in: “What the heck are you doing?” He had to get it in there: it was the headline-clincher (at CNN and elsewhere). But I suspect Lynch knows as well as the rest of us that the real answers to that question are all fairly uninteresting—this is the postmaster general we’re talking about, after all. It’s not exactly the most exciting job in the world.

On the question of motive Lynch hedged his bets, accusing DeJoy of either “gross incompetence” or “deliberately dismantling this once-proud tradition” of mail delivery. But the chairwoman was less ambiguous: “Perhaps Mr. DeJoy is just doing exactly what President Trump said he wanted on national television, using the blocking of funds to justify sweeping changes to hobble mail-in voting.” Nothing like some good old-fashioned fear-mongering: Convincing the public that your opponent is plotting to snatch an election out from under you is one hell of a way to snatch an election out from under your opponent.

Later in the hearing, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) circled back to the question of the sorting machines. “If it would cost less than a billion dollars,” he asked, “regardless of if it’s efficient or not, what is the harm in just putting those machines back until election day, just for the peace of mind, for the confidence of the American people?” (The answer, apparently not obvious to Ro Khanna, is about $1 billion dollars—which is, uh, a lot of money.) After attempting, unsuccessfully, to explain that the machines aren’t necessary for processing the slight increase in volume that mail-in ballots would bring during election season, DeJoy cracked a smile and said, “Get me the billion and I’ll put the machines in.” Then he chuckled—he had just explained extensively that there was no possible way Congress could get a billion dollars in funding to the self-sustaining USPS. That didn’t stop Khanna from posting a clip of the exchange to Youtube with the title “Ro Khanna Gets DeJoy to Commit to Restoring Voting Machines.” (They’re not voting machines, and he didn’t really commit to anything.)

But the real whopper of the day came from Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN). Cooper accused DeJoy of undertaking deliberate sabotage efforts against his own USPS, amounting to “implicit campaign contributions” to Trump’s reelection effort, then came out of left field with a headline-clincher of his own: “Mr. DeJoy, is your backup plan to be pardoned like Roger Stone?” It’s obviously not a question asked in good faith. He obviously wasn’t even looking for an answer. It’s just another attempt to conjure up spectral conspiracies in the lead-up to the election. What’s interesting is that Cooper, like Lynch, has been fairly moderate in the past. Both men seem like living proof that the center cannot hold in times like these.

Maloney, Lynch, Khanna, and Cooper all played a cynical game in Monday’s hearing. It’s typical of the destructive, hysterical politics of 2020: they tell us that American democracy is at risk—and only they can save it—while swinging a massive axe at its base. The vast number of Americans who are sure to believe their outlandish speculation will be pushed far to one side, convinced that Trump and his cronies in the Post Office are plotting to steal the country from the good people in the Democratic wing of the House Oversight Committee. The equally vast number who are not convinced will be pushed just as far to the other side, seeing such blatant manipulation from the left. It may be an effective strategy in the short term (or it may not) but it’s sure to be corrosive and disastrous in the long term.

Perhaps Ar-Arg-maginnon is nigh, after all. I think I see four horsemen readily at hand.