For when you’ve persuaded yourself that foreign threats are themselves fabrications concocted by your domestic adversaries.

According to Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the threat posed by TikTok is wildly overstated. Compared with the menace posed by our fellow Americans, in fact, the communist Chinese entities that exercise prohibitive influence over that application are virtually harmless.

Sure, dozens of private and public American institutions and the public servants who occupy them insist that TikTok is “full of spies,” he sneered dismissively. Well, “so’s Facebook, but it’s the CIA instead of Chinese spies,” Kennedy added. So is “Instagram, and YouTube, and Google.” That raises an existential question: “Are you more worried that the Chinese are spying on us and propagandizing us,” he asked, “or are you more worried that the CIA is spying on us and propagandizing us?”

Your answer to this question depends on whether you believe hostile foreign powers are a greater threat to your liberty and safety than your neighbors. Republicans of a certain age will recognize this default cynicism as the sort that was once common among those on the conspiratorial Left — people like, well, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But his disposition has become increasingly associated with the Right insofar as the Right has begun to retail itself as home to America’s cynics.

“NATO is a greater threat to American liberty than the Chinese Communist Party,” wrote the controversialist who Donald Trump installed at Foggy Bottom as his acting under secretary for public diplomacy at the State Department, Darren Beattie. Given Beattie’s insistence that the Chinese are justified in their repression of the Uighur minority (and all who object to its program of ethnic cleansing “should be shamed as a Uighur Supremacist”) and his desire to trade Taiwanese sovereignty for “serious concessions on Africa and Antarctica,” it’s possible Beattie’s logic is informed primarily by Beijing’s interests. But we cannot rule out the prospect that Beattie came to his delusion honestly — the natural result of a thought process that starts from the presumption that the apparatus of the American state is arrayed against you and those like you.

That seems to be the set of assumptions that leads libertarian congressman Thomas Massie to oppose a variety of U.S. missions abroad, including its efforts to punish China’s grotesque human rights abuses. “When our government meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries, it invites those governments to meddle in our affairs,” he wrote in defense of one such vote.

Let’s bypass the notion that opposing, in action as well as rhetoric, the attempted eradication of the Uighur minority’s culture by a bigoted regime constitutes meddling in the legitimate activities of a sovereign state. Down that way lies madness. Instead, we’ll dwell only on the notion that hostile foreign actors do not aggressively pursue their own interests at America’s expense unless as a reciprocal response to American action. Those who take this cognitive shortcut risk following it to its fallacious conclusion: the menaces that threaten me from abroad are an extension of the menaces that threaten me at home.

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone of a conservative or libertarian ideological inclination who rejects the notion that state power can be abused and wielded against the citizenry. That idea — one that contrasts with the progressive supposition that enlightened, rational government by an expert class is preferable to the dog’s breakfast voters serve up every two years — is a fundament of conservative political philosophy. But those of us who retain some capacity for discretion should be able to recognize the distinctions between challenges posed by domestic and foreign threats.

That distinction becomes harder to draw once you’re so far down the rabbit hole that you’ve persuaded yourself that hostile foreign threats are themselves fabrications concocted by your domestic adversaries. That’s when healthy skepticism verges on lunatic paranoia.