Read This: One man’s journey from Sesame Street to the heart of truther collage art

Depending on what exit you take off the internet superhighway to get to the weird parts, you may or may not have been exposed to David Dees’ artistic and cultural contributions. Gawker has produced an in-depth article that provides some insight into the man behind the work. One thing is for certain; if you have seen Dees’ work, you’d remember it:

Dees’ work is typified of heavily layered, garishly oversaturated images, dedicated to capturing the truth behind Monsanto, Obama, the Zionists, 9/11 false flags, and a whole host of other conservative-leaning conspiracies. These startling collages can be appreciated from the level of craftsmanship, even if one finds the message objectionable. And while the art becomes predictable, Dees’ road to creating it is a little more surprising.

Dees was at one point a illustrator working for Sesame Street—a company who was no doubt colluding with imperial Zionists to poison children’s brains—and grew up wishing to be an airbrush artist. So what happened? According to an interview with Dees, images from the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon opened his eyes. The artist came to understand, by looking at photos with his untrained eye, that the attack was an inside job, and gradually began to look at other conspiracies as a sprawling network of ill-intent that implicated liberal government, industrial agriculture, Israel, and big pharma. Eventually those views made his work at Sesame Street impossible, and Dees began a strange journey that lead him to crafting highly stylized collages used by provocateurs on the extreme right end of the internet.

The full article includes more of Dees’ self-stated purpose behind his art, discusses his work from both a sociopolitical and artistic point of view, and looks at Dees through the lens of his devoted fan base. It also paints a sad portrait of somebody who found a narrative in the paranoid turbulence of vast conspiracies and has been pulled so far into it that his identity has been reshaped, not unlike the way he reshapes stock art into nightmarish visions of subterfuge and collusion.