How America Became The Land Of Conspiracy Theories

A comprehensive mapping of paranoia, propaganda, moral panics, misinformation, and extremism

Art by Jeff Cassel

Conspiracy Culture In America Today

Over the past century, conspiracy theories have primarily referred to fringe beliefs, such as the moon landing being faked or the Denver Airport being built by the New World Order. However, in recent years they’ve become increasingly popular through mass media and the internet, with the term primarily used to describe people who form entire ideologies involving global shadow governments, corporations, and powerful people. These ideological conspiracy theories are generating rapid appeal in the wake of coronavirus, merging with decades of general paranoia and spreading faster than the truth, resulting in extremist echo chambers that thrive on misinformation to counter the “mainstream.” To be clear with how terms are used in this paper, conspiracies are defined as covert plots to do harm and can be uncovered through abductive reasoning and material evidence, whereas conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable narratives formed through prejudices, sensationalism, and flawed assumptions based outside material reality. Both are explored throughout, along with propaganda, misinformation, moral panics, and extremism, all of which relate to varying degrees.

Far more people believe in conspiracy theories today than one might realize. Studies and polls have found that around 36% of Americans believe it’s at least probably true that COVID-19 was planned by people in power, 74% believe some type of “deep state” exists, 10% believe vaccines cause autism, and 50% of Americans believe at least one conspiracy theory. So what causes this? Like most things, it’s complicated. There are correlating links between anxiety and conspiratorial beliefs, and Americans are polling more anxiously each year with 59% considering this to be the lowest point in US history they remember. Some studies suggest that populism leads to a rise in conspiracy theories, especially when people feel their values, livelihoods, or institutions are under threat. Psychology, socioeconomics, ideologies, and partisanship can play a role, however partisanship isn’t a reliable predictor. For example, while 58% of Republicans believed Obama wasn’t born in the US, 51% of Democrats believed the government either assisted or ignored information on 9/11, showing over half of each party was potentially susceptible to conspiracy theories. Partisan beliefs can change these inclinations as well, based on affirming biases, opposing biases, and that parties not in power will often conspire toward those in power.

There’s a crisis around every corner today. Institutions are crumbling with racial tensions, poverty, and deaths on the rise. People are afraid and seeking stability. Ideological conspiracy theories offer a simple, affirming narrative and clear enemy to help people cope, whether it’s conspiring that the Chinese Communist Party created COVID-19 or that Trump is secretly working with a military agent named “Q” to bring down a global cabal of satanic pedophiles, such as QAnon ascribes to. In a bizarre way, creating these stories of good and evil help people make sense of a chaotic world. They believe that a deep state divide-and-conquering America with a race war is easier to embrace than addressing America’s racial history, current political landscape, and failures at handling this pandemic. The countless questions surrounding coronavirus have only fueled this fire, including the lasting health impacts, efficacy of lockdowns, what the case numbers are, or if masks work (they do). This stems from the pandemic’s scale, online misinformation, politicization of the virus, fears of mortality, and personal hardships that have people seeking answers in the wrong places.

All this opened the floodgates to viral conspiracy theory videos, such as Plandemic and Out of Shadows. They reached tens of millions of people and have been pushed by preexisting anti-vax groups, new agers, QAnon, mainstream conservatives, and the president himself. Many sources have continued to push unproven miracle cures like hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma, snake oil like colloidal silver, and unfounded ideas like “warm weather will slow the virus.” While there have been several historical rises in conspiratorial beliefs during times of crisis, two political scientists from Miami analyzed 100,000 letters sent to the New York Times and Washington Tribune over 120 years (1890 and 2010) and didn’t find evidence for an increase over time. That said, much has changed from 2010 to now. Ideological conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and QAnon are a rampant new phenomena. Understanding them requires looking back through history — how have they become so prominent and why are they so appealing?

A History of Polarization and Paranoia

The western world has fostered paranoia of secret societies, shadow governments, and “the other” since the 1700’s, notably around the Illuminati, freemasons, KKK, and Jews. Conspiracy theories have been used to foster hatred with claims that groups of people are inferior, such as the history of slavery and racism toward black people in the US. Others have been based on claims that groups of people are superior, such as the anti-semitic publication Protocols of the Elders of Zion that manufactured a secret Jewish plan to control the world and was spread through Nazi Germany. These prejudices often simultaneously place “the other” as both powerful and subhuman, with comparisons to animals or infestations that need to be removed or controlled. Parts of this thinking became common in America throughout the 20th century and remains at the root of many popular conspiracy theories today. After WWII, conservative media began separating itself from establishment media with publication (Human Events), think tanks (The Heritage Foundation), and anti-communist advocacy groups (John Birch Society), because a growing portion of conservatives claimed the media and universities were compromised by Marxists and atheists. This red scare led to a national witch hunt for communists, tapping into right-wing conspiratorial attitudes that were stirring from prior decades. The anti-semitic trope “cultural Marxism” became prominent, stemming from fears of Marxist intellectuals in the Frankfurt School infiltrating America. 1960’s counterculture brought this to a head, including the civil rights movement, gay liberation movement, anti-war movement, psychedelic movement, feminism, postmodernism, and rising divorce, and abortion rates. Many Americans were filled with paranoia that the country was changing too fast, becoming immoral and hijacked by “outsiders” (minorities, atheists, satanists, and communists). Positive media coverage of the civil rights movement and critical coverage of the Vietnam war were also viewed as the first evidence of “liberal bias.”

The left began producing its own conspiracy theory culture during this period after JFK’s assassination in 1963 and the cover-ups of Vietnam War casualties and crimes. These were driven by anti-capitalist and anti-war attitudes. Some on the left believed JFK was killed by the military industrial complex and MLK Jr. was killed by the FBI. This paranoia spun into books, articles, and created a crossover between socialists and libertarians. Both groups shared disdain for corrupt government power, war, and media cover-ups, while indulging in psychedelic culture and the new age movement. After Watergate in 1972, Americans across the political spectrum harbored an increased distrust of government, media, and the education system. They were also gaining intrigue in the metaphysical, which bled into the rise of popular cult movements. This continued through the 1970’s and 80’s as sci-fi continued popularizing with more extraterrestrial and paranormal content, in lockstep with growing UFO culture and spiritual warfare within Evangelicalism. General paranoia ensued throughout the 70’s and 80’s over the effects of radiation and power lines as well.

As the de facto cultural identity of Christianity declined, many in the country felt directionless. Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority filled that vacuum in the 1980’s by merging the anti-government attitudes of conservatives with spiritual warfare beliefs of Evangelicals. This new influence in part led to the satanic panic throughout the 80’s, with fears that satanists were secretly running America. It was launched by the biographical account in Michelle Remembers about a child experiencing repressed memories of ritual abuse. Shortly after its spread, the famous McMartin Preschool trial spread the fear that children were being trafficked and ritually abused in day cares, leading to day care sex abuse hysteria. The unfounded Franklin child prostitution ring allegations did the same, with public figures being accused of running a pedophile ring, as did news of the mysterious DC commune called The Finders. This moral panic spread across the country and led people to over-analyze pop culture, like metal music that referenced the devil or Dungeons and Dragons where players could cast spells.

Once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and crime in America (and around the world) dropped, the right-wing lost their longstanding enemy. Conservatives then began targeting the United Nations and their Agenda 21 sustainability plan, which the John Birch Society proclaimed was secretly an environmental cover-up for a “New World Order” while climate change was being polarized by corporate interests. Around the same time, famous conspiracy theorist Bill Cooper’s Beyond a Pale Horse popularized the “New World Order” conspiracy theory even more on the conservative right, televangelist Pat Robertson’s book New World Order did the same for Evangelicals, and David Icke appealed to new age culture with conspiracy theories about public figures being reptilian pedophiles. Hip-hop culture jumped into this trend as well, with artists like LL Cool J, Dr. Dre, and The Wu-Tang Clan all mentioning the Illuminati or New World Order in songs. This ushered in a new era of ideological conspiracy theories, integrating the government working with aliens, banks (Jews), satanists, media, and Hollywood to create a one-world government. Countless books and movies about the end times were the result, as well as The Davinci Code, which popularized freemasonry within American history.

By the late 90’s, right-wing media like Fox News and conservative talk radio had separated itself from establishment media, eventually leading to left-wing media like Air America emerging as a counterbalance. This marked when distrust among right-leaning people toward institutions became clearly split in media representation, resulting in split realities of news and facts. Conservatives believed government agencies like the FCC were liberal-leaning and censoring their views for decades, so they had abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which was placed to theoretically maintain objectivity in the media. Politicians such as Newt Gingrich continued polarizing the Republican party through outrage culture in the 90's, and Bill Clinton’s scandal with Monica Lewinksy did the same for Democrats. As online media took off, the next decade led to magnified issues, such as the Y2K apocalypse paranoia and tragedy of 9/11, which sparked global anti-semitic conspiracy theories and anti-Muslim bigotry. Conspiracy theories continued forming through the 2007–08 financial crisis, mass immigration, and coverage of mass shootings. The internet created a new medium for conspiracy theories to spread in the 00’s, including a self-proclaimed time traveler named John Titor who would post vague predictions on message boards and the NESARA cult led by Dove of Oneness.

The internet amplified ideologies and conspiracies alike by connecting millions of people. Information’s gatekeepers were gone, yet this paved the way for unregulated misinformation as well, with an immediate rise in paranoia around stem cell research, abortion, the military industrial complex, and all popularized theories of the past. There was a slough of new conspiracy theories around Obama’s presidency, such as him being the antichrist, secretly Muslim, and being born in Kenya — covered on mainstream news outlets and popularized by Trump, which spearheaded his rise into politics. The 9/11 truther film Loose Change arguably launched the trend of propaganda videos going viral online, and right-wing conspiracy videos followed it like The Obama Deception and Fall of the Republic by InfoWars. Alex Jones gave a network to millions of people who believed in deep state and his work continued to spread misinformation around events like the Sandy Hook shooting and Boston Marathon bombing, calling them false flags with crisis actors, and others being part of a New World Order plot to sow discord in the country.

Both the Tea Party movement on the right (driven by anti-government) and the Occupy movement on the left (driven by income inequality) involved 9/11 truthers. Conspiracy theories were fusing with pop culture around this time with TV hits like Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura and Ancient Aliens. Several high profile events added to America’s paranoia in the following years as social media became more centralized, such as the 2012 Doomsday scare and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappearance in 2014. Online culture wars amplified political polarization starting in 2013 with Black Lives Matter, then Gamergate, the legalization of gay marriage, Vanity Fair cover of Caitlyn Jenner, and MeToo movement, coinciding with the rise of socialism and the alt-right. Politics had reached every corner of the internet, just in time for the 2016 election cycle.

Ideological conspiracy theories exploded during this time, starting with the Clinton email controversy. DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered around the time WikiLeaks leaked thousands of DNC emails, so many people on the right conspired that the Clintons had him killed, despite no evidence of a connection between him and WikiLeaks (the DNC emails were tipped to WikiLeaks after his death). This bled into Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory where people online believed that the leaked emails contained code words for Democrats running an underground pedophile ring in Washington DC. A year later in the same subcultures, QAnon emerged as a conspiracy theory that Trump was working with secret military officers to bring down a deep state cabal of satanic pedophiles, including the arrest of Hillary Clinton. Pizzagate and QAnon went on to become omni-conspiracies that enveloped the past century of American conspiracy culture as vulnerable people spent too much time online during lockdown.

Jeffrey Epstein’s suspicious suicide shortly after being indicted on numerous sex charges in 2019 led to an viral meme: Epstein didn’t kill himself. Nearly half of Americans believed Epstein was murdered and his death poured fuel on the fires of Pizzagate and QAnon, partially because it revealed there really are powerful people who are pedophiles with blackmail on one another, and partially because his death was dubious, similar to the death of Lee Harvey Oswald while in custody. These grains of truth were enough to pull intrigued people deeper into more outrageous theories. All the while, conspiracy culture continued normalizing online. Shane Dawson spread them to younger audiences with his YouTube conspiracy series and Joe Rogan spread them by platforming guests like Alex Jones on his podcast. There was a notable surge in flat earth, chemtrails, and celebrities secretly being part of the Illuminati

Over time, ideological conspiracy theories congregated in the political right-wing, partially due to cultural anxiety and conservatives temperamentally fearing change. As immigration increases and new cultures integrate into America, racialized fears are aggravated, as well as a general urge to conserve life the way it is. The most extreme example of this is the white genocide conspiracy theory that claims falling white birthrates coupled with immigration are part of a deep state plot to exterminate the white race. The GOP laid a groundwork for conspiracy theories over decades with witch hunts for communists infiltrating America throughout the Cold War, Evangelicals perpetuating the satanic panic, the NRA exploiting people’s fears that the government and liberals wants to take their guns, right-wing media leading fear-mongering campaigns around immigrants coming to take American jobs, and Muslims coming to enforce Sharia Law. Today the mainstream political right claims scientists are lying about climate change and coronavirus, and the media is fake news, with constant references to the “deep state.” On top of Trump’s baseless birtherism claims, he’s promoted that Obama planted a spy in his 2016 campaign to help Clinton win, now known as “Obamagate.” The right has propped up countless anti-semitic conspiracy theories around George Soros that Fox News started in 2007 since he donates billions of dollars to progressive organizations around the world through Open Society Foundations, spreading the “Jews run the world” ploy. Similar conspiracy theories around the Clinton Foundation still spread today, despite a 2015 investigation finding no wrongdoing.

No ideology or person is immune to conspiracy theories, including the political left. Notable examples on the far-left are the belief that billionaires like the Koch brothers orchestrate all the world’s problems. While it’s true they have significant influence over politics, the far-left often pushes this into conspiratorial territory like the right does with George Soros. Other examples include thinking that proponents of neoliberalism feed off disasters to keep capitalism functioning, that the DNC conspired against Bernie in the 2016 election, or that international politics are controlled by pro-Isreal lobbyists (which can easily slip into antisemitism). On the center-left the conspiracy theory spread that Vladimir Putin blackmailed Trump with a video of him watching prostitutes urinate on a hotel bed. Although Trump’s Russia investigation resulted in several indictments in his administration, outlets like MSNBC parroted conspiracy theories that Trump himself was secretly working with Putin. Left-leaning media outlets spread misinformation and platform conspiracy theories around political opposition, such as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911. People on the left tend to develop paranoia around corporations, while people on the right tend to around governments. As groups become polarized they see opposing groups less accurately, often misrepresenting them to the point of extreme narratives or populism that dip into superstition, which can easily be manipulated by conspiracy theorists and propagandists.

Declining Institutions and Distrusting Experts

Americans losing trust in experts and institutions has led to increasingly divided information consumption, and erosion of democracy. This mass uncertainty allows conspiracy theories and extremist ideologies to fill people’s needs. The latest Edelman report shows only 30% of Americans trust the government to “do what is right” and 42% trust the media, while a 2019 Pew poll found only 17% of Americans trust the government to “do what is right.” A more recent 2020 poll found 90% of Republicans believe social media companies censor political viewpoints. Polls have shown trust in the CDC and public health officials dropping since the start of coronavirus. A Transparency International survey found 60% of Americans thought the US became more corrupt in 2017. One study showed only 14% have a “great deal” of trust in higher education and another study showed trust in science among American conservatives has been decreasing since the 1970’s. Gallup polls show similar decreases in most institutional trust over the past several decades, with only 32% of Americans having confidence in them today. A 2014 Reuters poll found 24% of Americans supported seceding from the union and a 2017 Zogby International poll found 68% of Americans were open to the idea as well. These numbers reveal a fragile, divided country.

Political scientist Robert Putnam noted in his book Bowling Alone that between the 60’s and 90’s, community memberships declined in Lions Club, the League of Women Voters, and bowling leagues. He argued that society became less trusting from decreasing social connections. One of the primary communal institutions in America has been churches and similar findings show church attendance has dropped each decade since the 1960’s. These correlating trends highlight Nietzche’s “god is dead” quote about how the Enlightenment made science, reason, and materialism the new cornerstones of culture, replacing a unified belief in god and splintering society with more diverse beliefs that reveal unique challenges. Scholars have cited globalization killing industries, automation replacing jobs, corporations becoming de facto monopolies, a decline in unions, and a move from trades to assembly lines and bureaucratic office jobs as harms to public health. Postmodernism contributed to fragmented metanarratives that led Americans to splinter into various ideologies. Liberalism encouraged people to fixate on individualism and independence, leading to a disconnect from communities and group identities. Rejecting tradition and authority empowered them, but it also changed cultural structures. Marriage went from social arrangement to personal fulfillment, art went from free expression to building personal brands. Deconstructing hierarchies left a void that god, traditions, and tight-knit communities once filled. Today they are replaced with everything from political ideologies to activism to video games to wellness trends. And, of course, conspiracy theories.

People need agreed-upon information for a democracy to function. When someone handpicks data they want to believe from counter authorities and demand others trust it, while simultaneously dismissing expert consensus on that very data, it’s a massive problem. Tom Nichols describes this in The Death of Expertise. He concedes the failures of experts and institutions exist and need to be dealt with, but must be done so through better experts and institutions, rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water. Many argue that perceived societal corruption correlates to distrust. According to a 2014 Gallup poll, 75% of Americans believe corruption is widespread in the government. If people believe law enforcement or scientists are corrupt, why trust them? Others cite the failures of higher education, dying local news, rise of fake news, and/or sensationalism in news and reporting as part of the problem. This leads to inaccuracies and propaganda. Specific events have eroded public as well, such as the media’s complicity in leading America into the Iraq War (including the New York Times), banks getting bailouts after causing the 2007–08 financial crisis, the government’s failed war on drugs, the EPA failing the Flint water crisis, pharmaceutical companies manipulating physician prescriptions, the police murder of George Floyd, their failed response to protests, or the CDC failing to track early coronavirus cases. The government is full of nepotism and cronyism. The healthcare system is broken and full of corruption. College has become increasingly unaffordable with admissions manipulated by administrators. These are institutional failures that warrant criticism.

Bad faith actors sow doubt and discord into the mix as well, such as scientists paid by corporations to produce studies that man-made climate change is a myth, people perpetuating misinformation online, bot and troll campaigns, and politicians vilifying institutions. Experts and institutions should not be immune from criticism for cases of corruption, costly mistakes, and the like, but the public response should be accountability and solution-based, rather than based in paranoia and populism. Scientists, researchers, journalists, and experts generally haven’t been the most effective at communicating messages over the years. They may be working uphill to reach a population dumbed down by infotainment, but they still bear responsibility. Most people today have a hard time differentiating between credible experts and pundits, or scientists and science communicators. Media often blurs these lines in order to create conflict, either between opposing guests on a panel, or by inviting a singular representative to speak on behalf of a complex issue that may not have an expert consensus.

On top of this, the internet democratized information with no guardrails to guide people through it, leading to trolls, grifters, corporate interests, and algorithms designed to manipulate people. Online discourse has spread into every corner of the internet, encouraging people to search for answers to questions through a litany of biases, most notably confirmation bias, or searching for what affirms preexisting beliefs. This leads people to type loaded statements into search engines to find what confirms their preexisting beliefs, coupled with algorithms that lead the most extreme, personally-tailored information to float to the top. Most people lack the education, media literacy, and critical thinking skills to accurately research or understand information outside their expertise. They distrust what they see in the media, so they attempt to research for themselves without being able to differentiate credibility from disinformation.

People base their trust in areas without ever touching the source material, and if they were to do their own research they would still be reliant on the experts who conducted it. Scientists conduct experiments using controlled variables and randomization and compile empirical evidence to conclude a hypothesis. This goes far beyond watching YouTube videos and drawing circles or arrows on a screenshot from 8chan. Accessing all the data in a field is often impossible because much of it’s paywalled, kept in labs, and/or contested offline. This is a problem when countless figures pose as experts who stand outside of their field’s consensus. Scientists can still commit errors, but consensus on a subject is enough to rely on for most cases. When scientists admit they’re wrong or uncertain about a finding, this can lead to laypeople discrediting their work entirely, often thanks to sensational headlines. Part of America’s growing distrust in institutions and experts correlates with growing hatred of “elites,” a sentiment that populists like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders tapped into. Many saw Trump as a middle finger to elitism, who constantly called Hillary Clinton “corrupt” and the media “fake news.” Bernie was viewed similarly, as a wrench in the DNC establishment who created a grassroots movement in spite of corporate media bias. If people distrust expert consensus on an issue, they’ll always find a source to justify their beliefs, which is how pseudoscience and conspiracy theories gain momentum, and if people feel lied to by institutions, it creates a vacuum for these exploitative forces.

Rising Anti-Science and Pseudoscience

Hundreds of years ago, magical thinking was commonplace. People explained the mysteries of life through gods, angels, demons, karma, curses, and the like. Although organized religion remains a powerful cultural force today, the enlightenment slowly began to change the centrality of it with rationality and science becoming the law of the land. However, in times of mass uncertainty and struggle, magic thinking reemerges, similar to how some atheists pray when times get tough. Anti-science has exploded in popularity with conspiracy theories baked in. For decades, fringe groups have believed HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, global warming is a cover to create a New World Order, vaccines cause autism, and genetically modified foods are unsafe. Pseudoscience and new age beliefs are on the rise as well, such as reincarnation and astrology, as well as alternative medicine, crystals, and supplements. Social media platforms then provide the space to bring like-minded groups together.

Many of these beliefs cause serious consequences through misguided public health policies, decrease in science funding, resistance to innovation, and dropping vaccination rates. Some have become hot-button partisan issues, with conservatives overwhelmingly disbelieving in climate change. Others remain bipartisan, with both conservatives and liberals holding similar levels of anti-vax, anti-GMO, and new age beliefs. The common underpinning between these movements is that the “mainstream” is lying to everyone, yet those inside can see through it, which often leads them to blindly trust alternative media and any misinformation that affirms their views, which leads to a pipeline toward more ideological conspiracy theories like QAnon.

As conspiracy culture accelerated in the 1990’s, pseudoscience did as well. This led to the now debunked self-esteem craze led by public figures like John Vasconcellos, Louise Hay, Deepak Choprah, and Oprah Winfrey. From there, the self-help movement took off spreading new age solutions to everyday problems — an industry that’s grown to around $11 billion. This continued into the 2000’s with The Secret, which popularized pseudoscience known as the “law of attraction,” and into the 2010’s with talk show Super Soul Sunday. Self-help figures have fed different markets in the mainstream over the years, including Tony Robbins, Dr. Oz, Brene Brown, Elizabeth Gilbert, Tim Ferris, and Marie Kondo. With the election of Donald Trump causing conversations about celebrities running for office, many people wondered who would be the “Trump of the left,” with some arguing it would be Oprah. Although that didn’t happen, new age-adjacent spiritual leader and author Marianne Williamson announced her bid for the Democratic nomination in 2019, laying the groundwork for magical thinking on the political left as a counter to the right.

The same people who seek out this content are often those vulnerable to conspiracy theories and extremism. Caleb Cain was a college dropout radicalized by far-right content on YouTube who cited self-help videos as the first phase of his descent, which led to figures who combined self-help with political rhetoric, like alleged cult leader and white nationalist Stefan Molyneux. This parallels with the online culture of “father figures” like Jordan Peterson, who draws in disenfranchised young men, as well as the “mommy internet,” which draws in stay-at-home mothers. Language from within self-help communities cross-pollinates with conspiracy theory groups like QAnon as well, such as “lightworker” or inviting people into a “spiritual awakening.” In even more fringe communities, there are psychic mediums who have grown in popularity from the same trends. Skeptics and scientists have worked to debunk these fields for decades, but magical thinking tends to always rise during times of stress and despair.

On a similar trajectory, the alternative medicine industry has grown to around $34 billion, including yoga, homeopathy, and acupuncture, with only a third of the treatments tested at any capacity. This has partially rebranded as the “wellness” industry. Some of the most popular avenues are the $5 billion essential oils industry and $9 billion yoga industry. Some studies have shown potential health benefits of these practices, but the research is still weak so scientists and doctors are hesitant to get behind them without empirical evidence. These trends have also taken off because America has major physical and mental health problems with complex causes, tied to poor quality and access to healthcare. Poor physical health is connected to poor mental health and low income, which leads to countless vulnerabilities. People turn to alternative medicine or self-help to feel like they’re in control of their own bodies. They’re frustrated with the healthcare system and the blanket solution of “taking a pill” to solve their problems, so they want to integrate solutions into their lifestyle that include spiritual and emotional elements. Along the way, a percentage of them conspire that doctors and scientists are keeping the “real” cures from people due to financial and sinister motives.

Many companies have taken advantage of this trend, such as the cult-like essential oil pyramid schemes, Young Living and doTERRA, along with various other supplement pyramid schemes like Monat and HerbaLife, which sell vitamins, juice cleanses, and push pseudoscience like “detoxing.” They exploit America’s economic crisis by selling a “side hustle,” America’s health crisis by promising healing, and America’s ego crisis by promising a personal brand. 99% of participants in pyramid schemes lose money in the long run and the stories of people who fall victim to them are endless, with not only financial damage but damage to personal relationships and health. Snake oil salesmen operate the same as cult leaders or conspiracy theorists — they seek vulnerable people to seduce with a magic bullet to all their problems. Medicinal? Here’s a pill. Communal? Here’s a family. Uncertainty? Here are the answers. Many self-labeled healers or coaches believe they can help people. Essential oils may make someone feel more relaxed, but there’s a difference between using an oil to potentially alleviate pain and doing so to treat or prevent ailments. A self-help book may motivate someone to start exercising, but there’s a difference between using a book to get motivated and repeatedly buying books or attending seminars for years about getting motivated.

On top of society’s conditions and the internet amplifying pseudoscience trends, there’s also been a rise in anti-science beliefs over the decades. This partially stems from expert and institutional failures, as well as the propaganda efforts by corporations and climate change denying conservatives. Anti-science beliefs and attitudes shift over time as science is seen as being politicized or corrupt. This can be accelerated by highly publicized scandals, frauds, and controversies such as Climategate in 2009. These sow doubt into the scientific process and actors. Human error is baked into all institutions, including biases, corruption, and everything in between. However, this is corrected by better experts and institutions with the scientific method, rather than turning to fringe information. In fact, all science denial is predicated on ignoring scientific consensus and the largest bodies of evidence, while cherry-picking low-quality studies and appealing to fringe “experts.” Those who do this often accuse opponents of being “shills” or brainwashed. They rely on anecdotes, feelings, and experience, they use scientific errors as reason to distrust science, and they guise their conspiracy-driven ideologies as “just asking questions.”

In the internet age, it’s common to hear “anyone can find studies to back up what they believe.” This thinking comes from today’s access to “Big Data” and a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. It’s true that hand-selecting studies or scientists can be done for nearly any belief, including ones as fringe as flat earth and creationism, but that doesn’t equate to scientific consensus. Scientific consensus does not mean settled science either, because science is constantly improving upon itself and rarely results in complete agreement. There are always those who go against the tide, whether due to grifting, vested interests, or genuine skepticism. Petitions and studies persist that disagree with the consensus on climate change, evolution, GMO’s, or vaccines.

Scientific consensus is a universally agreed-upon majority understanding of the best available data. For instance, it has repeatedly shown that GMO’s are safe (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), that climate change is exacerbated by humans (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13), and vaccines are safe (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13). When anti-science advocates disbelieve these consensuses, they base it on the idea that scientific institutions “got it wrong” or are “hiding the truth from people” (e.g. hiding the cure for cancer from the public or working with Monsanto to suppress the dangers of GMO’s). Very few people oppose science as a concept, process, or even industry, but people only “love science” until it rubs up against their ideology. Discrediting tactics include attacking individual scientists, critiquing “objectivity,” degrading the validity of studies by calling them “just theories,” claiming science can lead to “slippery slopes,” and placing science on equal footing as pseudoscience. These are forms of postmodernism that position all truth as relative, a sentiment found on both the political left and right.

Anti-science and pseudoscience movements thrive when times get hard. They also thrive in the US because it’s an atomized society that focuses on individualism over collectivism, both politically and culturally. When people’s physical, emotional, and spiritual needs aren’t met on those levels, they seek them out individually. This can be liberating for those who start their own businesses or become professional athletes, but it can be isolating for those who want meaning in a post-religious framework, happiness in a town with no community, or good health in poor socioeconomic conditions. Self-help, alternative medicine, pyramid schemes, drugs, cults, or any forms of “woo” are all ways people try to find what’s missing in their life.

The Influence of Evangelicalism and Cults

People have always been seduced by the metaphysical — religion, magic, super powers, life in other realms, transcendence through drugs or extrasensory perception. Mysteries around the meaning of life draw everyone to seek answers. Many of the same factors that lead people to religion or political ideologies are what lead people to conspiracy theories — a search for answers, acceptance, belonging, something to fight for, and a good story. For some, it’s hard understanding how anyone could believe that the world is controlled by a cabal of satan worshipping pedophiles, but to millions of Americans that story aligns with preexisting beliefs. Over 40% of Americans identify as Evangelicals and 45% believe demons and ghosts exist.

QAnon is an ideological conspiracy full of archetypal characters, forces of good and evil, and an invitation for followers to play a role, similar to Evangelicalism. It offers an explanation for why the world is so messed up by explaining the unknown through terms they’re familiar with, such as “spiritual warfare.” This relates to their history of attributing tragedies to satanists or god’s wrath on people for being immoral. It emphasizes saving children from sex trafficking, one of their leading causes since the satanic panic, and centers around a deep state. Many of the anti-semitic elements of conspiracy theories derive from the tension between Jesus and Jews in the gospels, as well as modern tensions between conservative Evangelicals with secular, liberal Jews. About half of Evangelicals believe the creation of Israel in 1948 fulfilled a biblical prophecy ushering in the end times, with the antichrist soon inhabiting the earth. Christians believe they’ll be taken to heaven in a rapture, while everyone else is left behind in a globalized government takeover. The bible affirms that if a prophecy doesn’t come true, it’s not of god. This is why every generation has talks of the end times and when they don’t happen, the dates get moved. Failed predictions are human error, successful ones are part of god’s plan, just like the endless failed predictions of Q that have not deterred countless people from believing in QAnon. If a prophet can’t be wrong, the ideology can’t be false. This is why focusing too heavily on “debunking” failed predictions or pointing out historical errors in a holy book is often pointless. Ideologies are all-consuming worldviews built to withstand errors and adapt as necessary.

The spiritual warfare and apocalypticism of Evangelicalism partially explains why so many of them are attracted to QAnon and disregard climate change. If the world is ending in this lifetime, why care about the future? Evangelicals also believe that “the world” is against god — institutions, scientists, journalists, and pop culture. Some of its most prominent figures today affirm the deep state, Hollywood and the media being evil, along with a range of other disturbing conspiracy theories. Since the Moral Majority’s formation, the tie between Evangelicals and Republicans has created a Christian nationalism that reinforces these narratives. QAnon lays the groundwork of a “storm” coming when Trump arrests all the deep state satanic globalist pedophiles and justice is finally served. A day of judgement. A future utopia. Trump himself fulfills the core tenet of Evangelicalism by being “born again” and used as an instrument for god’s will, despite his flaws.

There are cult-adjacent movements and ideas within Evangelicalism as well, such as the Seven Mountain Mandate, a dogma that Christians must reclaim America’s cultural and political institutions from being controlled by Satan in the name of God to prepare for the end times. Another example is the Jesus movement from the 1960’s-70’s — Christianity’s version of the hippie movement. Christians from all over the country migrated west and formed communes that led to the charismatic branch of Evangelicalism popularizing, which emphasizes spiritual warfare. Some of the communes like The Family and Jesus People even became literal cults. The lines between religions and cults are often blurred in general and some of the most infamous ones include offshoots of Christianity, including the People’s Temple, Unification Movement, Heaven’s Gate, Branch Davidians, and Aleph.

Cults took off during the psychedelic movement in the 1960’s and led to eastern practices like yoga and meditation popularizing in America. Some even argue they’ve always been an integral part of American life. They’re defined as having strict worship of a leader and doctrine, controlling all aspects of people’s lives, and creating built-in mechanisms to guard them from outside criticism or influence. They’re hierarchical, similar to pyramid schemes. The lowest members are used to recruit new members with limited knowledge of the top members and they emphasize faith to not question the leader(s). They discourage critical thinking and gaslight people’s perceptions until they’re living in a warped reality, but they often do so through love bombing and affirmation. They also separate people from their loved ones by devaluing them and claiming it’s for the greater good, so they become dependent on the leader and group. For example, NXIVM began in the 90’s as a pyramid scheme offering self-help seminars and courses that reached tens of thousands of people. By the early 2000’s it was being referred to as a cult and as technology evolved, members were controlled through smartphones. In 2018 the founder and several associates were arrested for sex trafficking and various other crimes. Self-help, pyramid scheme, cult, and sex trafficking ring — they had it all.

Over the decades people have looked to self-help gurus, holistic dieticians, pop stars, influencers, and everyone in between as quasi-cult leaders as well. They may not command adherence or dogma, but they offer guidance, advice, and rules to live by, and inspire people to routinely come back to them for community for their own personal exploits. In the digital world, it’s harder to isolate and control people like traditional cults once did, so many have adapted to newer models. They fit timeless mythological archetypes that have existed for thousands of years and will continue evolving into new forms that target vulnerable people. Ideological conspiracy theories like QAnon fit the same mold, with Q as the prophet, their posts as religious texts, their followers as the community, and Trump as their savior.

From Extremely Online To Extremists

Internet culture harbors extremists both in its darkest corners and in broad daylight. Throughout 2019, three mass shootings were tied to the anonymous message board 8chan, including the El Paso shooting, Christchurch shooting, and Poway synagogue shooting. Each shared similar announcements and racist manifestos around Muslim and Hispanic immigration based on ethnonationalist beliefs, accelerated by the white genocide conspiracy theory that posits white people are becoming a minority through racial integration, low birth rates, and multiculturalism — a plot often blamed on the Jews via old anti-semitic conspiracies theories. These far-right extremists often cross-pollinate with race realists who believe black people are genetically inferior to white people, anti-feminists who believe women are inferior to men, as well as far-right conspiracy theorists who believe in QAnon, which started on 4chan. There’s no shortage of conspiracy theorists and white nationalists in America congregating in these anonymous communities, which largely emerged from recent online culture wars.

Their origins can be traced to the late 1990’s on the forum site Something Awful. Most active online users at the time were male and in tech — gamers, programmers, hackers, trolls, and social outcasts. Something Awful provided the space for them to create a culture centered around shared interests, as well as undermining institutions and the status quo. This led to the origins of “shitposting” AKA posting content to derail, troll, bully, or just get a reaction. As time passed, some users left to form Weird Twitter, subreddits, or become gamers and YouTubers. One user left to create 4chan in 2003 as a lawless forum for anime porn and extremism. 4chan attracted users by not requiring an account to engage with threads, which would typically disappear over time. It became known for trolling, hacktivism, doxxing, and raiding shows, forums, and blogs, as well as in-person demonstrations against The Westboro Baptist Church and Scientology, all “for the lulz.”

As Internet culture became more mainstream in the late 2000’s, it pushed 4chan’s subculture deeper. Sites like Reddit and Tumblr often shared content from 4chan and were gaining millions of users. This influenced older users to migrate to 4chan to escape the “normies,” escalating tensions between platforms. By 2012, Reddit had their first mainstream press with the profiling of violentacrez, one of the site’s most notorious trolls who moderated dozens of racist, misogynistic, creepy communities. This led to Reddit becoming more censored and advertiser-friendly. During this time, the online culture wars were brewing. Reddit was the largest online community for atheists, paralleling the YouTube skeptic community with figures like The Amazing Atheist, Armoured Skeptic, and Thunderf00t, each inspired by The New Atheist movement. In 2011, there was a controversy called Elevatorgate that led to feminism becoming online atheist’s new target, replacing religion. The following year there was a harassment campaign against Anita Sarkeesian over a Kickstarter project to confront female stereotypes in gaming that led to the same outcome more broadly online.

This became a culture war fought privately between users of 4chan and Tumblr, and publicly between users on platforms like YouTube and Twitter. While it raged in extremely online corners of the web, Black Lives Matter launched onto the mainstream in 2013, starting a new era of political activism on public social media platforms. By 2014, 4chan and Tumblr ramped up their raid wars until they culminated in Gamergate when programmer Eron Gjoni published a blog about his ex Zoe Quinn, accusing her of an unethical relationship with gaming journalist Nathan Grayson. This riled up 4channers, Redditors, and the YouTube skeptic community to spread the word, which led to a harassment campaign and rally against political correctness in video games, which soon blurred into a reactionary battle against diversity in gaming. Gamergate was the first time mainstream media outlets covered gaming and internet culture en masse, and they critically reported on it, often defending the feminists involved. This reinforced anti-media biases of the gaming community. As 4chan began censoring content on Gamergate, users flocked to Infinitechan, later known as 8chan. This became the new “free speech absolutist” platform, even openly allowing pedophilia.

Many reactionary provocateurs made names for themselves online during this time, including Milo Yiannopolous, Sargon of Akkad, and Ian Miles Chong, as well as right-leaning commentators like Christina Sommers and Dave Rubin. Battles were primarily fought in YouTube videos, articles, and subreddits like r/KotakuInAction and r/ShitRedditSays. Gamergate laid the groundwork for future reactionary content. What started as a fight against “feminism” under the guise of ethics in gaming journalism morphed into fighting “social justice warriors,” which morphed into the “regressive left,” which then simply became a new version of left-right political fights. During this period, the cultures of Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, 4chan, and 8chan were all shifting. The 2016 election cycle created a zeitgeist for viral articles in social justice-oriented media, criticizing straight white men. Headlines like The Straight, White, Middle-Class Man Needs to Be Dethroned or MTV’s documentary White People received severe backlash.

4chan users ramped up offensive content in 2014–15 with the clearest example being Pepe the frog. This meme began as a generic reaction until celebrities like Katy Perry posted it in 2014, which drove anons (users) to create more offensive Pepe content that became associated with the alt right and Trump. Once Donald Trump Jr. posted about Pepe and Trump retweeted a meme, that connection was solidified. Trump embodied the 4chan ethos in his chaotic nihilism that was seen as counterculture to mainstream media and politics, so 4chan started a meme war to help him get elected. This successfully distanced 4chan from the mainstream, but also integrated unironic extremists to join in larger numbers than ever before. It was then impossible to discern what memes were “ironic” or dog whistles. For example, the “ok” symbol started as 4chan users trolling, then white nationalists started using it, then it’s usage was obscured. That ambiguity worked in the favor of far-right ideologues.

The culture wars around feminism, LGBTQ, and Islam in particular became proxies for reactionaries to rally around online. In early 2016 Christina Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Steven Crowder teamed up for a viral event titled “The Triggering.” Shortly after The Rubin Report launched its rebranded show with its first viral episode featuring new atheist Sam Harris and next one featuring Milo Yiannopoulos. At the time, Rogan began platforming the same people, as well as far-right figures like Gavin McInnes and Alex Jones. This is when the “intellectual dark web” formed, including many of the figures mentioned previously. It’s also where the concept of an extremist online “pipeline” formed, where these figures would show up one each other’s shows, leading fans of a standard conservative like Steven Crowder to then easily start following Milo Yiannopoulos, then more extreme figures like the white nationalist Richard Spencer. Of course, this wasn’t always the case, rather YouTube algorithms, associations, and mass accessibility created the potential pipeline and echo chambers for radicalization. Trump’s election victory popularized fake news on the far-right with sites like Breitbart and figures like Alex Jones, Mark Dice, Lauren Southern, and Jack Posobiec. Shortly afterward, men’s rights activist Mike Cernovich joined this amalgam of figures by spreading the Pizzagate conspiracy theory as well.

During this populist rise on the right, there was also a populist rise on the left. In the wake of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, the viral socialist podcast Chapo Trap House launched. Weird Twitter and Left Twitter became the driving subcultures for leftism online. Progressive commentators Cenk Uygar and Kyle Kulinski established Justice Democrats in 2017 as a political action committee to boost progressive candidates, the DSA gained momentum from both Sanders’ campaigns, a network of leftist YouTubers gained popularity in a community called BreadTube, and antifa gained more notoriety that continues to this day.

2017 was the year online political polarization and extremism boiled over. Several events made national news, including the Berkeley riots, Richard Spencer getting punched, and the Unite The Right rally that culminated in a counter protestor being murdered by a white supremacist. This was also the founding year of QAnon. Extremist content and edgy debates on YouTube, and Twitch grew increasingly popular in what became known as “internet blood sports.” There was an online centralization of libertarians, men’s rights activists, far-right reactionaries, and conspiracy theorists. These figures weren’t ideologically identical, but they shared similar networks and anti-left sentiments, expressing paranoia around Muslims and Hispanic immigrants, as well as racist conspiracy theories that black people are genetically less intelligent and more violent.

From 2017 onward, far-right conspiracy media outlets like OAN, The Epoch Times, and Valuetainment gained momentum, beginning to reach more mainstream audiences. Trolling online was once contained to a small community, but now opened to millions of people. Extremists learned that if they could make a splash, people would react, then journalists would be pressured to cover it, which would amplify the message and accelerate distrust in those media sources. They gamed the system. Once a conspiracy theory like white genocide is widespread and producing real world consequences, it’s the media’s job to produce credible information to counteract its disinformation, but they do so at the expenses of amplifying it. This laid the groundwork for ideological conspiracies to go mainstream like Pizzagate in 2016 and QAnon in 2017, both of which formed from the cultures of 4chan and Reddit.

The Ideological Conspiracy Theories of Pizzagate and QAnon

The internet brought like-minded extremists together who were primed for ideological conspiracy theories, so when Pizzagate presented the theory of an underground pedophile network full of popular Democrats, it took off. This captured imaginations in 2016 following the Clinton email scandal and murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, which had far-right sources spreading false claims that the DNC or Hillary Clinton herself had him killed because he sent the emails to WikiLeaks, when in reality they were sent by the real source 4 days after his death. This was flamed by Julian Assange and is perpetuated to this day by QAnon believers who claim Democrats hire MS-13 gang members to do their dirty work.

WikiLeaks started publishing DNC emails in October that contained several prominent public figures. This included Democratic donor John Podesta and his brother, Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta, both with ties to the Clintons and Obamas with a family known for fundraising dinners. Users on 4chan and Reddit interpreted conversations in these emails as pedophile code words and it became a puzzle to discuss. For example, “cheese pizza” meant child porn and handkerchiefs referred to gay sex fetishes. Just as Illuminati symbols like eyes and triangles can be found anywhere, it became easy to find connections of food and children wherever users wanted to see them. An archive of theories and the subreddit r/PizzaGate was created, filling with thousands of users, many crossing over from r/TheDonald. Another email exchange was Podesta inviting performance artist Marina Abramovic to a “Spirit Cooking,” which trended on Twitter and was later connected to a video of her work that went viral, resulting in countless death threats and trolls accusing her of being a satanic witch. They also found a baseless Andrew Breitbart tweet about John Podesta being part of a sex trafficking ring in 2011. These were the first connections to the alleged pedophile ring.

Users on 4chan’s /pol/ board posted another email exchange with James Alefantis, owner of Comet Ping Pong Pizza in Washington DC, placing his restaurant at the center of this alleged pedophile ring. They discovered Alefantis was friends with John Podesta, in a relationship with David Brock who was the founder of Media Matters, Correct the Record, and a supporter of Hillary Clinton. Combing through Alefantis’ Instagram, they archived all his posts of children, as well as a photo of Obama playing table tennis in the White House that was interpreted as him in the basement of Comet Ping Pong (there is no basement). They then learned artist Arrington de Dionyso painted a mural in the restaurant and Tony Podesta collected artwork from artist Maria Marshall, who occasionally used her son as a model. Each of them received countless murder, rape, and torture threats. Podesta’s art collection was notable because one of the reasons cited for his divorce was him buying art without telling his wife and he apparently had a vault for his collection beneath their property. New findings continued spreading through social media platforms and fake news sites like Your News Wire and InfoWars, which is how they garnered a more mainstream appeal. Several far-right conspiracy theorists amplified Pizzagate early on, including Michael Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, Alex Jones, and Michael Flynn Jr, with his father and National Security Advisor Michael Flynn tweeting something Pizzagate-adjacent.

The conspiracy theory culminated in December of 2016 when an extremist entered Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15 who was convinced a child sex trafficking ring was in the nonexistent basement. No one was harmed, but this became a national story. The extremist wasn’t a “nutjob,” he was a devout Christian who believed he was saving children from pedophiles. Many Pizzagate conspiracy theorists believed he was a deep state plant to discredit their theory (big surprise). In a poll taken shortly after this event, 46% of Trump voters and 17% of Clinton voters believed Pizzagate was at least probably true. WikiLeaks continued fueling this fire by tweeting links to Donald Trump’s subreddit, which was also obsessively posting about it and found a link between the Clinton Foundation and Laura Silsby, a refuge worker who attempted to traffick children across the Haitian border after the 2010 earthquake, claiming she was doing this for the DNC pedophile ring. They also falsely roped in the death of a sex worker advocate in Haiti to the Clintons. These theories went on and on. What can be concluded from the WikiLeaks emails is that the Podestas, Clintons, Obamas, and James Alefantis are all loosely connected through DNC fundraising and DC networking, and the Podestas and Alefantis are both into dark modern art. These two truths were enough to set off obsessive pattern-seeking trolls to patchwork a massive conspiracy theory.

Countless conspiratorial offshoots came from Pizzagate, including Obama bringing child sex slaves to the White House based on a 2012 WikiLeaks email from random employees at a geopolitical intelligence company called Stratfor who thought Obama spent $65,000 of tax-payer money on flying in pizza and hot dogs for a private party. This email was sent weeks after right-wing bloggers and media made these viral claims based on Obama flying in a private pizza chef for a White House party, outraged at him spending tax-payer dollars. Another popular one was Frazzledrip, a video (that does not exist) of Hillary Clinton mutilating a child in a satanic ritual for “adrenalchrome,” spread by a fake news website in 2018. Adrenalchrome is the made-up concept of adrenalized children’s blood based on the ancient anti-semitic concept of “blood libel,” in which Christians accused Jews of drinking children’s blood in rituals. It was used by the Nazis and the term was popularized by a Hunter S. Thompson novel, then became a viral conspiracy theory online. Chrissy Teigen was accused of trafficking her children by conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin in 2017 because she dressed her daughter as a hot dog. This spiraled again in 2020 when a fake Epstein flight log meme went viral that included Teigen’s name, along with several celebrities who were never listed on the real flight log, including Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres, Beyonce, and Katy Perry. Some celebrities have made comments about Hollywood’s pedophilia problem in recent years, such as Elijah Wood and Corey Feldman, which inspired fake celebrity quotes on the topic going viral, including Mel Gibson, Robert Downey Jr, and Brad Pitt. Pizzagate eventually dispersed into various subcultures, some of which broadened it to “Pedogate,” which took the concept of Pizzagate and broadened it into a New World Order of satanic pedophiles operating an international sex trafficking ring.

Earlier in 2020, Venezuela YouTuber DrossRotzank posted a video about how Justin Bieber’s song “Yummy” was actually about Pizzagate, which soon gained millions of views and spread Pizzagate to several countries, trending it on Spanish Twitter. This theory spiked again in April during the lockdown when Pizzagate documentary Out of Shadows went viral and TikTok users began associating it with the Bieber conspiracy theories, and exploded in June when both Pizzagate and QAnon believers spread a video of a Justin Bieber Instagram live stream where a user asked him to touch his beanie if the Pizzagate rumors were true and he did (there’s no proof he saw the comment and the video was edited). According to The New York Times, the Pizzagate hashtag was viewed more than 82 million times in 2020 before being banned from TikTok. These events created a brand new market for Pizzagate and QAnon: teenagers. Teenagers are notorious for exploring taboos and mysteries, which is highlighted in the viral popularity of Shane Dawson’s YouTube conspiracy series. Many of these teens are not ideologically brainwashed, but they’re still being used to amplify the message.

The origins of QAnon began in 2017, with “Q” meaning Q government clearance and “anon” being short for anonymous users on 4chan. People struggle in defining QAnon. It’s a cult-like group of people, an ideology, and omni-conspiracy theory that umbrellas various theories into one. It was originally known as “the storm” based on Trump calling his military dinner the “calm before the storm” in October of 2017. At the end of the month an anonymous 4chan poster who came to be known as “Q” began posting cryptic, militaristic messages about George Soros, the Obamas, and Trump’s master plan to take down their deep state in a purge called “the storm,” which would result in all these alleged DNC criminals going to Guantánamo Bay (or being executed), followed by a US military takeover that would usher in “The Great Awakening.” QAnon was the latest iteration of many past anons online, but this one took off early on partially because Q predicted Trump would tweet the word “small” and Trump tweeted about Small Business Saturday right after, among other generalized coincidences. Eventually Q’s posts moved to 8chan after claiming they had been infiltrated on 4chan. Q uses tripcodes to be identified across multiple posts, which keeps them from being reverse engineered and confirm their identity, although their tripcode has changed several times, allegedly due to leaks.

With the help of two 4chan moderators working with a blogger named Tracy Diaz, their posts began getting shared on platforms like Reddit and Discord, eventually reaching public platforms. The MeToo movement in 2017 created a heightened awareness to sexual abuse in Hollywood, beginning with Harvey Weinstein — likely adding momentum to QAnon. By 2018 large accounts were making propaganda videos on YouTube, which would get shared to Facebook groups and Twitter communities, spreading their message to older generations. Most of these newcomers never spent a day scrolling through the child porn and anti-semitism on 4chan or 8chan, but rather got their Q “drops” from hosting sites like qproofs.com, qanon.pub, or qmap.pub, which would post sanitized screenshots and links. Despite nearly all of Q’s predictions failing to come true and the mass arrests never happening, followers remain convinced they need to “trust the plan” to this day. Q and their followers rationalize this by saying each failed prediction means plans changed because the deep state caught on, or Q posted misinformation to throw them off. It has countless built-in mechanisms like this for every claim, making them impossible to be wrong.

So what is Trump’s master plan? Some claim Trump has been working behind the scenes with John F. Kennedy Jr. who allegedly faked his death in 1999 to plot Trump’s presidential run decades ago and save America, while others within the group denounce this theory. Who is the “deep state cabal?” Members allegedly include the Vatican, politicians, mainstream media, pop stars, bankers, lobbyists, Hollywood, pharmaceutical companies, and all high level Democrats (although the Bush family is involved too). They believe the deep state has existed for centuries around the world, causing wars, diseases, and an array of evils. It’s goal today is apparently to make people reliant on the government so they can control them to create an authoritarian one world government via mind control. This would be done with vaccines, microchips, chemicals in the water, and really anything they feel like claiming. According to interpretations of Q drop #570, there was a 16 year plan in place to destroy America with Obama in the first 8 and Hillary in the second 8, but Trump foiled the deep state’s plot. They believe the deep state hates and fears Trump because he’s exposing their lies and evil by calling them out. In the past year countless fake news stories have been spread about Trump saving children from this deep state of pedophiles, such as the military rescuing 35,000 children from underground tunnels in NYC and a fabricated crackdown on human trafficking arrests.

QAnon claims the deep state assassinated JFK because he tried taking them down, due to a fake viral quote of him saying “there’s a plot in this country to enslave every man, woman, and child. Before I leave this office I intend to expose this plot.” They believe Ronald Reagan was the next president to attempt the same, and when he was shot he stopped out of fear. Some QAnon followers believe Q is actually JFK Jr, who has allegedly posted on 4chan in Q’s absence (Q often goes weeks without posting). The identity of Q is still unconfirmed, although many have speculated or attempted to take credit over the years, such as alt-right trolls MicroChip and Dreamcatcher. Others have speculated that QAnon was started by 4chan moderators. The current leading theory is that the current owner of 8kun, Jim Watkins plays a role with his son Ron Watkins, who’s the site’s administrator. The problem is this speculation leads people down the same conspiratorial rabbit holes as QAnon creates. Without clear evidence, it requires shoddy abductive reasoning and leaps of logic. Available information points to it being run by several people over time, as the content and tone has dramatically shifted over time.

QAnon’s ideology closely resembles religious ideas like millenarianism (belief that a movement is here to transform the world) and apocalypticism (belief that the world is ending in one’s lifetime), both strong concepts found in Evangelicalism. This has made Evangelicals particularly drawn to QAnon, turning followers into evangelists tasked with “red pilling” the world to make people “wake up” to the reality of the deep state and think for themselves beyond the mainstream media. Followers dissect the 4,500+ Q posts each day like religious texts or a DaVinci Code to decipher meaning and connections. These posts act like horoscopes or fortune cookies, with broad, open-ended statements and leading questions that allow readers to attribute meaning wherever they want and choose their own adventure. It gives the illusion that people are thinking for themselves, when they’re really being led down a path. They refer to these clues as “breadcrumbs,” leading them out of the forest of fake news, and use many other metaphors as coded language. The obsessive search for numerology and symbols like eyes, pyramids, hand gestures, and logos are all part of the thrill.

Qanon achieved mass appeal due to being a big tent conspiracy theory that knits together right-wing politics, Christian beliefs, self-help, anti-semitism, and all conspiracies theories from JFK’s assassination to 9/11 being an inside job. It has something for everyone. It’s a game, a doctrine, a cause, a community, a religion, and a family. It attracts 2nd amendment advocates, mommy bloggers, Christians, new agers, libertarians, influencers, and everyone in between. Some people stumble in unaware of it’s more extremist fringes, thinking it’s just a group of Trump supporters that call attention to child sex trafficking, while others become instantly radicalized by having longtime prejudices affirmed. There’s an entire subreddit dedicated to people who have lost loved ones to Qanon, had their lives destroyed because of it, as well as a comprehensive list of all the damage the conspiracy theory has done, including murders, shootings, terroristic threats, kidnappings, and more. Because QAnon’s central beliefs focus on Trump leading a military takeover of the US that involves public executions of his enemies, it’s a naturally dehumanizing ideology. However, since believers think this will be “justice” and usher in world peace, they don’t see it that way. Calling them “conspiracy theorists” or “crazy” adds to their persecution complex. They believe they’re a god-chosen minority tasked with saving the world, while everyone else is brainwashed.

Throughout 2018 QAnon supporters began showing up at Trump rallies, forcing the media to follow more closely. So how big is it? According to a March 2020 Pew poll, only about 20% of US adults had heard of QAnon, but a more recent September Pew poll showed that number raised to about 50%. NBC News reported that Facebook had over 1,000 QAnon groups with millions of members. QAnon YouTube videos get millions of views, and their accounts have hundreds of thousands of followers. It’s reached at least 70 countries and there have been reports of Russians amplifying QAnon content. Several top accounts co-authored a #2 Amazon bestselling book. The FBI has labeled it a domestic terrorist threat and TIME listed Q as one of the 25 most influential people online in 2018. Right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk tweeted QAnon talking points, but deleted them once he learned what it was. Roseanne Barr has tweeted the QAnon phrase “WWG1WGA,” meaning “where we go one, we go all,” as has the creator of Minecraft, Notch. Former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling promoted a video on Facebook about QAnon. Jesse Waters has said they’ve “uncovered great stuff.” Eddie Bravo has endorsed it on the Joe Rogan Experience. Trump himself has amplified QAnon tweets over 200 times. There’s been a dramatic rise in QAnon content on Instagram and TikTok, and with lifestyle influencers since the pandemic. Estimates show that as many as 75 current or former Republican congressional candidates are QAnon believers, totaling around 600,000 votes (most of these candidates have no shot in winning). This includes Marjorie Greene, Jo Rae Perkins, and Matthew Lusk. After years of being worshipped in the Pizzagate and QAnon universes, former national security advisor Michael Flynn posted a video of him taking the “digital soldiers oath” on the 4th of July with the hashtag #TakeTheOath, which sparked headlines and encouraged hundreds of accounts to do the same.

Since the lockdowns, interest in QAnon has skyrocketed with people trapped inside on their devices all day doomscrolling through bad news on their devices. QAnon believers made the Wayfair conspiracy theory a viral sensation in July of 2020 through claims that listings on Wayfair with high prices (such as $10,000 for a cabinet) with people’s names (a common practice in retail) were actually children being trafficked. Wayfair released a lackluster explanation in response, further fueling this fire of what appeared to be a bug found across online retail stores by algorithms that set prices to match supply and demand. The theory was spread everywhere, from Twitter to Instagram influencers. It further merged QAnon believers with Evangelicals who lead anti-human trafficking efforts, and culminated with #SaveTheChildren the following month — a hashtag QAnon had been using for years. This jump-started international rallies and garnered uncritical media coverage, making it a success for conspiracy theorists trying to legitimize their seemingly uncontroversial message of “end sex trafficking” to get well-meaning people to jump aboard, then bait-and-switch them with conspiratorial narratives that this is caused by a deep state of satanic cannibal pedophiles and only Trump and the military can save everyone.

With this new messaging, QAnon began shifting focus toward women, who had always been involved in these communities, but were now on the forefront of Save The Children. Much of QAnon’s branding online is masculine and intense, including Punisher icons and guns. With focus being more on child sex trafficking, this new evolution took a more mom-centric aesthetic about saving children. Wayfair became Pizzagate 2.0, they both merged with QAnon, and Save The Children became a more palatable offshoot. This network of conspiracy theorists played the leading role in criticizing the Netflix movie Cuties in the beginning of September, causing #CancelNetflix to trend online and raise further debates about child porn and exploitation in pop culture. So what’s the truth behind pedophilia and human trafficking in America?

The Moral Panic and Myths of Human Trafficking

Moral panics occur when societies overreact in mass paranoia to a hidden evil or threat that can’t be quantified, usually during societal disorder. At the heart of today’s viral ideological conspiracy theories is a moral panic that human trafficking — particularly child sex trafficking — is the country’s greatest crisis being secretly enabled and orchestrated by the deep state. Human trafficking does exist in America, but not in the ways or at the scale people are led to believe. Fabricated human trafficking stories date back over a century to the “white slavery” conspiracy theory that white women were being kidnapped by foreigners and forced into prostitution. This spread through the country and led to the White-Slave Traffic Act. The bipartisan war on trafficking through the 1990’s and 2000’s created an alliance between evangelicals, neoconservatives, and feminists who believed all prostitution was either morally wrong or part of the patriarchy during the third wave of sex wars. Just as the war on drugs led to disastrous policies, widespread misinformation, and damaged poor communities, the war on trafficking did the same. As conservative Evangelicals continued losing culture wars over porn, abortion, and gay marriage, this became one of their new causes.

Over time, the forefront of the cause shifted from “human trafficking” to “sex trafficking” to “child sex trafficking.” Each of these terms encompass several definitions and invoke false stereotypes about the issues behind the terms, rendering them counterproductive. There is no universal standard definition for what qualifies as “human trafficking” or “sex trafficking,” which lowers the quality of statistics and leads to the misuse of research. This is a global problem and even acknowledged in the 2019 State Trafficking In Persons report, which is seen as the highest standard of reporting globally and has still been scrutinized by independent investigations and studies.

The legal definition of human trafficking is:

a) Sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act in induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age; or

b) The recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor services through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

This is a much broader range than someone being kidnapped against their will and forced into modern slavery, as is often advertised. Many anti-trafficking organizations don’t separate sex work from sex trafficking because there’s an ongoing debate between sex workers who want decriminalization and sex trafficking abolitionists who want to keep it illegal. One example of how this obfuscates statistics is if a homeless underaged youth is willingly doing sex work, they’re counted the same as an one being forced. The vast majority of underaged kids in sex trafficking do so on their own accord because they need money or shelter (survival sex). Sex trafficking is often conflated with human trafficking, which umbrellas an even larger set of issues. These include forced marriages and exploitative work conditions with estimated cases ranging from 20 to 25 to 40 million. All of this data is based on shoddy methodology that mixes several forms of exploitation within different economies and cultures to create one massive number, stripped of context. The term human trafficking is commonly understood as people being kidnapped to be exploited. Cases of this do exist, they’re just far more rare than advertised.

Since the US began tracking human trafficking cases in the 1990’s, they’ve spread overblown numbers. The GAO published a report in 2006 stating they needed better statistics and sociologist Ronald Weitzer published a study in 2007 quoting that the crusade against sex trafficking’s “central claims are problematic, unsubstantiated, or demonstrably false.” Some of the most cited data in the US is based on hotline calls to Polaris, which has received just over 60,000 calls since 2007. Their data is based on details tracked from those calls, which can range from confirmed trafficking cases to suspicions to requests for information to repeat calls, and everywhere in between. The FBI’s 2015 human trafficking report listed 965 offenses reported and Polaris even noted that the 2016 increase in call volume was mostly due to people spreading awareness of human trafficking and the hotline.

Many of the top human trafficking NGO’s including Polaris, International Justice Mission, Operation Underground Railroad, and Not For Sale, have been under scrutiny for publishing fabricated statistics, conflating sex work with sex trafficking, raid and rescue missions that leave sex workers worse off, not tracking the protection and rehabilitation of victims after they’ve been “rescued,” and pushing to criminalize prostitution. This involves government agents committing trafficking crimes themselves for arrests, such as paying for sex. Police are the ones most called to raid and rescue missions, which is controversial since they have a reputation for sexual harassment and many cases are children running from abusive homes or foster cares. The US conflates “human trafficking” with “human smuggling” as well with rumors of trafficking across border, but the USSC cites only 1% of all illegal smuggling offenses are coerced, which is how the term is often framed as, when it’s mostly people sneaking into the country or overstaying visas for work opportunities in exploitative conditions.

One widely shared statistic is that “300,000 children may be vulnerable to sex trafficking in the US each year” based on a 2001 report that’s based on faulty guestimates in which the author himself has denounced. In 2019 there were 421,394 reports of missing children, of which 90+% are typically runaways from abusive families or foster homes and over 99% return home. The widely shared “800,000 kids go missing a year” statistic was taken from a 2002 study based on 1999 data with the same problems. 99% of abducted children are kidnapped by family members (often custody disputes) and only about 100 are kidnapped by strangers each year. According to the most recent data from 2011, 92% of those 100 are recovered alive. Concerns over “stranger danger” and human trafficking have focused on boogeymen like foreigners or pimps snatching kids off the streets for decades, when the vast majority of missing children, kidnappings, and abuse cases are domestic. According to the 2019 FBI statistics, 609,275 people were declared “missing” and 607,104 of those records were purged due to the person returning home, being found, or the record being falsely entered. There is no evidence that vast numbers of children are disappearing to be sold into sex slavery.

The myths spread about human trafficking are endless. Every year viral headlines claim the Super Bowl (and other major sporting events) are hotbeds for human trafficking, which has been debunked for years. The vast majority of sex workers get into the industry through friends or social activities, not through coercion of pimps. There are ads to fight human trafficking in airports all over the country, despite there never being a confirmed case in one (but many cases of interracial families being reported). Journalist Michael Hobbes has done extensive investigative reporting in this area and notes that awareness campaigns fail to address the underlying complex issues of trafficking and instead push a myth that children are being kidnapped and sold into sex slavery.

These myths will continue feeding conspiracy theories like QAnon until there’s a cultural effort to share the truth. Human trafficking has been marketed as a national problem for decades and has generated hundreds of millions of dollars both publicly and privately, yet still has no credible studies showing the numbers of victims, no proof there’s a nation-wide crisis, and scarce evidence that current solutions help the underlying problems. Most of the passed sex trafficking legislation is only designed to criminalize sex workers and punish offenders. Children are the most innocent, vulnerable demographic, making them perfect candidates to build movements around. Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign raised awareness about child soldiers in Uganda and was heavily criticized for simplifying and sensationalizing a geopolitically complex issue, bearing similarities to today’s Save The Children rallies that simplify and sensationalize the issue of child sex trafficking.

Conspiracy theorists who believe in this moral panic rebut the overwhelming data by spreading unfalsifiable rumors, such as “kids aren’t reported missing because parents sell them and never tell authorities” or “kids are kidnapped and sexually abused while they’re missing before returning home.” These are claims based on complete guesses with no empirical evidence to back them up. If those don’t work, they’ll say “the people conducting the studies are in on the sex trafficking ring,” which is a logical dead end. The issues behind human trafficking are real, such as coercive labor conditions, homeless youth being put in vulnerable, exploitative situations, broken foster care systems, and children running away from abusive households. There are countless people who work in this area that want to fix these problems. Lasting solutions require policies around health care, housing, immigration, and social programs that conspiracy theorists rarely want to talk about. Cases of sex trafficking that fit the stereotype of kidnapping and being sold into the sex trade are rare, but do happen and are horrific. The problem lies in how the terms have been weaponized to create a moral panic that causes people to be overly aware and fearful to points of diminishing return, based on bad statistics, ideologies, prejudices, politics, and obscuring several problems under one umbrella. This draws people to extremism and conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and QAnon, believing they’re helping a cause, when they’re really hurting it.

Healthy Skepticism and Real Conspiracies

Conspiracy theories often come natural to people because powerful figures and institutions don’t always have their interests in mind. The bigger the system, the more likelihood of bureaucracy, corruption, and errors. Statistician Nassim Talib popularized the term “black swan” to describe high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations, such as 9/11 or the assassination of JFK. These events lead to trauma, confusion, and the public conjuring conspiracy theories in hopes of demystifying them. Talib refers to COVID-19 as a “white swan” event since it was much more predictable, but the impact of people’s confusion and despair has similar effects. In American history, countless real conspiracies have been uncovered as public scandals and used as the foundation for conspiracy theorists to formulate their ideologies. It’s important to acknowledge them because a high-minded, dismissive liberal attitude exists that denounces all conspiracies as “right-wing nonsense,” which obscures real ones and feeds the narratives that liberals are defenders of corruption, gatekeepers of the status quo, and are secretly behind them, while allowing the right-wing to control anti-corruption narratives and provide community for skeptics of power. Skepticism can be a healthy tool when tethered to material reality.

For instance, the CIA orchestrated interrogative mind control experiments in Project Artichoke and MKUltra. They’ve attempted (and succeeded) in overthrowing several governments via coup d’états. They’ve recruited propaganda journalists during the Cold War in Operation Mockingbird and Nazi scientists to compete with Russia in Operation Paperclip. The FBI conducted illegally targeted surveillance and infiltration of “subversive” groups like civil rights activists in COINTELPRO. The Department of Defense proposed false flags like Operation Northwoods where they were going to arm Cubans, have them attack Americans, then blame Cuba. They committed war cover-ups like the Pentagon Papers. Watergate was a conspiracy at the highest levels of government. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments and unethical studies like it went on for decades. Tobacco companies paid doctors and scientists to convince people they were safe, and corporations did the same to downplay the effects of global warming. Russia meddles in US affairs and the US meddles in many other country’s elections. The NSA was spying on citizens. Powerful people silence victims of sexual abuse, blackmail one another, and have private clubs like Bohemian Grove where they perform bizarre rituals. The Catholic Church has a long history of sexual abuse and pedophilia. Public intellectuals in the past fought to lower age of consent laws, and adults having sexual relations with children was broadly normalized across cultures historically, and is still common in many parts of the world. ICE has sex trafficked girls and detained immigrant children with thousands of sexual abuse reports. Pharmaceutical companies lied about the addictiveness of OxyContin and continue to price gouge medications. The military industrial complex and prison industrial complex are real. Government PSYOPs occur. Corporate news media has been consolidated into an oligopoly and bought by advertisers. Politicians are often bought by billionaires and corporate interests. Wealthy people get away with breaking the law, and social media companies censor content in order to appease their advertisers and consumers.

In the case of nearly every real conspiracy, the truth is uncovered by journalists, whistleblowers, researchers, mistakes, credible reports, or declassified documents. Ideological conspiracy theories like QAnon take these grains of truth and weave unfalsifiable narratives around them. They take the Jeffrey Epstein and Catholic church scandals, then conclude there are satanic forces working behind the scenes in an interconnected web of deep state elites plotting world domination. When Alex Jones says “they’re turning the frogs gay,” he takes a fact that pesticides in water can turn frogs from male to female, then claims the government is releasing these chemicals to feminize men. Because humans look for patterns, it’s natural to follow from A to B if it confirms biases. Being skeptical of power is a healthy human trait. There have always been and will always be “unknown” events behind the scenes in all institutions, but conspiracy theories provide a false sense of secret knowledge that depletes critical thinking skills and stifles real change.

Ideological conspiracy theorists also place immense esteem in the capabilities of people and institutions. They believe an international deep state sex ring can keep their evil secrets for decades, even centuries without anyone going to the press. There was actually a study done demonstrating the math of how many moving pieces it would take to contain a vast conspiracy like 9/11 being an inside job. It showed the more individuals involved, the higher likelihood the truth would come out in shorter periods of time. Human nature proves time and time again that people can’t keep secrets. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It’s natural to create narratives in the absence of factual reporting. Believing the world is secretly run by satanic cannibal pedophiles controlling everything is comforting because it paints a clear, evil, human enemy that can be defeated and an explanation for random acts of terror or tragedy, like 9/11 or the coronavirus.

The Psychology of Conspiracy Theorists

There are countless conditions that make people susceptible to conspiracy theories. They can range from social isolation to financial struggle to loss of loved ones. In knowing that most people subscribe to at least one conspiracy theory and anyone can be vulnerable under the right circumstances, how much do psychological factors play a role? The answer is: it depends. Some conspiracy theories have a broad appeal, such as JFK’s assassination or Jeffrey Epstein’s death, while others have marginal attraction, such as The Illuminati or flat earth.

The field of psychology literature is wide-ranging, with similarities to that of cults and religions. Many variables need to be controlled for when studying conspiracy theorists and theories, including singular events (the Sandy Hook shooting) versus ideologies (QAnon), or social conditions versus personality traits. This makes replication studies and drawing direct causal links rare, but there have been several correlating factors found to establish intersecting patterns. For example, in a meta analysis of close to 100 studies, researchers couldn’t establish a link between conspiratorial thinking and personality traits from the Big Five like agreeableness and openness. That said, personality traits can still help categorize people politically and cognitively, which can help determine what kinds of conspiracy theories they may believe.

A 2017 study concluded that conspiracy beliefs stem from epistemic, existential, and social motives. The current research shows that belief in conspiracy theories comes from people searching for the truth, purpose, belonging, and a range of other motives from personality traits to social needs. There are indications that exposure to conspiracy theories can have a hidden effect on people’s beliefs as well. Some research from 2014 indicates that conspiracy beliefs are associated with lower analytical thinking and greater intuitive thinking, as well as low intelligence. Other research that year found lower education being a link, in relation to poor socioeconomic conditions or “losers” (e.g. marginalized people). In 2015 a study proposed that politically knowledgeable and distrustful people are prone to ideologically motivated conspiracy theories. This demonstrates why it’s important to understand how the data intersects with factors that make someone vulnerable — it’s not just “stupid people” falling for conspiracy theories, it’s intellectually curious and intelligent people as well with various traits. There’s also solid evidence showing if someone believes in one conspiracy theory, they’re more likely to believe in others.

Studies have drawn associations to religious views, extreme political views, delusional thinking, teleological thinking, narcissism, anxiety, and a need to feel special, with strong ties to schizotypy and psychological projection. Those who feel powerless, alienated, or lacking control are consistently related as well. These factors shed light on the many causes that can potentially make hundreds of millions of people in America vulnerable to conspiracy theories. They also demonstrate why so many conspiracy theorists refuse to admit they’re wrong, even in the face of irrefutable evidence. When someone has staked their reputation and life’s purpose on a belief, there’s a sunk cost to letting it go. It can cause anxiety, humility, or worse. If someone feels socially outcast yet overly confident, it can be easy to believe they’ve found “the truth” while the masses have been fooled by those in power.

When discussing the psychology of conspiracy theorists people often bring up the “backfire effect,” which claims when someone has strong views that are challenged with contradicting evidence, they double down or become more polarized, rather than changing their mind. Research into this concept is limited and has been challenged by two studies in recent years, concluding the evidence to be weak and even positing that countering conspiracy theorists with corrected information made the ideas less enchanting to people. Some experts argue that because conspiracy theorists distrust institutions, they distrust facts themselves, which makes rational arguments difficult. Others claim that when presented with counterevidence, minds can be changed. There isn’t enough data to make strong conclusions in this area.

Psychologist Rob Brotherton has identified several biases that can make people susceptible to conspiracy theories, cults, and various forms of exploitation: confirmation bias, which is seeking out and accepting data that confirms preexisting biases; proportionality bias, which is the assumption that big events have big causes; intentionality bias, which is assuming every event happens due to someone’s intention; the third person effect, which is assuming other people are more susceptible to propaganda than you are, and several others. Social psychology more generally shows that everyone uses motivated reasoning to make decisions, influenced by emotions and beliefs. People tend to be led by intuitions, overestimate their ability to understand complex subjects outside their expertise, and search for patterns, all of which can all lead to conspiratorial thinking. Some experts even believe humans evolved the belief in conspiracy theories thousands of years ago from tribes being paranoid of violence between one another. They can be observed throughout human history with peasants, slaves, and working people having to speculate what the rich and powerful were doing, because in many cases they were in fact, conspiring.

Note: There is a degree of left-leaning bias in social sciences, such as conservatives being the subject of analysis and being described negatively more often, but it’s not clear how much this impacts the data in this field.

Closing Remarks and Resources

In a fragile society, amidst a pandemic, with increasing numbers of people losing jobs, healthcare, and stability, natural skepticism goes haywire. When healthcare costs become unaffordable, people in need look to alternative wellness methods; when people feel isolated, they search for communities and are susceptible to exploitation; when jobs or free time are limited, they search for quick fixes for meaning; when erratic tragedy strikes, they seek orderly answers. Desperate times create desperate people, and the “winners” of these desperate times often find ways to place blame on an “other,” rather than the flawed systems working for them. There’s no singular characteristic that makes someone vulnerable to conspiracy theories, it’s typically intersectional. One can be powerful but not feel loved, rich but not have purpose, and famous but not have a community.

Social media platforms are the primary aggregators of misinformation that manipulate public opinion and create the space for conspiracy theories to fester, but they’re finally beginning to fight the beast they created. YouTube began marking videos with misinformation and redirecting users to Wikipedia, Facebook added a fact checking feature, TikTok has blocked Pizzagate and QAnon hashtags, and Twitter has banned many conspiracy theorist accounts. Research in this area is new and limited, with conflicting studies showing that correcting misinformation can both help or backfire. Journalists are still learning how to cover extremism and conspiracy theories, in terms of what coverage does more harm than good. Decisions have to be made as to whether amplification is necessary to counteract the viral spread of misinformation, or if it’s still fringe enough that reporting on it does more harm than good. Trolls, provocateurs, and conspiracy theorists alike want to be reported on and debated to amplify their beliefs. They produce outrageous content, which produces outrageous reactions, which makes for popular stories, so it’s often a win for everyone involved. Unfortunately this comes at the expense of public health.

Once people have been consumed by ideological conspiracy theories, there is no catch-all solution to get them back. Some never come back, some take years, some take total isolation. Some need to lose everything to reach an “aha” moment, others need intentional relationships that chip away at the cultish thinking. Sometimes deplatforming works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes debate deters people, sometimes it doesn’t. Psychologists, political scientists, and journalists often prescribe strategies, but most are generalized and subjective. Approach relationships with love, curiosity, and search for common ground. Private conversations are usually recommended. Reaching extremists is often futile, but reaching out to their networks may not be. Conspiracy theorists almost never act in good faith because they believe those outside their group are “asleep” or “brainwashed” by a deep state or the mainstream media. There’s even a conspiracy theory that the CIA invented the term “conspiracy theorist” itself to discredit people who questioned JFK’s assassination, which they use to reinforce their stigmatized beliefs. Conspiracy theories are not a “both sides” issue that warrants debate in the public square, but it can be beneficial to concede points to make points sometimes. Humor and mockery are a more contentious method, with some claiming it helps create a social environment where potential conspiracy theorists are deterred, while others claim it only leads to a taboo or people feeling more marginalized. Many popular rhetoricians have influenced others through mockery, including members of the new atheists, alt right, and dirtbag left.

The problem with proposing solutions to mass conspiracy theories, misinformation, and extremism, is that everyone is behind the eight ball. Ideally, proactive measures need to be put in place, rather than reactive ones. Kids need to be taught better media literacy and critical thinking in schools. If they aren’t getting it there, adults should be consuming and sharing these resources. Here’s a list:

• Crash Course has a video series on Media Literacy
• News Literacy Project has resources for educators
• Stanford has a free Civic Online Reasoning course
• Rand Institute has a project titled Countering Truth Decay
• ASU offers a course on media literacy
• Calling Bullshit offers a course with several resources
• How To Detect Media Bias and Propaganda has free critical thinking tools
• The Debunking Handbook has tips for debunking

It’s not enough to only teach these subjects. People need to know the history and context behind conspiracy theories and ideologies to avoid being sucked into them. Agreed-upon facts and information are vital to democracy, but they need to be wrapped in unifying and inspiring narratives for people to hear them.

Editing thanks to Joe Cole and Doug Muller