This reminds me of the runs on toilet paper in stores throughout the states. There was never a shortage of TP, but the massive hording brought the supply chain to a crawl since it could not deliver the TP as fast as people were stockpiling. The even stranger thing is that this was not the first time the US had a sudden mass run on TP! That's some really weird and baseless fear that held sway over HUGE MASSES.
Social psychology is full of derogatory concepts and terms ("moral panic", "conspiration theory" etc.) My question is always: Is such a concept used (or usable) in a bipartisan way? Can "we" use it to question ourselves? Can others use it to question "us"? Or is it only a way for "us" to signal our superiority in comparison to "them"?
For example, in the case of financial bubbles the term is quite useful, because we would normally control ourselves by asking ourselves if we lean into a delusion. In the case of politics, things are more difficult.