JustPaste.it

www.theatlantic.com /politics/archive/2021/01/betting-against-qanon-predictit/617396/

The Dark Reality of Betting Against QAnon

Story by Ilana E. Strauss
6-8 minutes

QAnon—the conspiracy theory that elite Democrats, government officials, and celebrities are part of a cannibalistic, child-sex-trafficking cult, and Donald Trump is the hero destined to stop them—has allegedly inspired kidnappings, car chases, and a murder. It has also made 28-year-old Patrick Cage a lot of money.

In 2018, Cage, a Californian who works in international environmental policy, discovered a gambling platform called PredictIt. It was an unusual betting site: Its users didn’t wager on card games or horse racing. Instead, they made predictions about politics. People put money on questions like “Will Kanye run in 2020?” and “How many times will Trump tweet this week?” Its tag line: “Let’s Play Politics.”

“You can sort of think about it like a political stock market,” Cage told me.

Cage had been following politics obsessively since the 2016 election, and he thought PredictIt would be a good way to test his newfound political acumen. So he bet that Kanye would run for president.

“That’s probably my proudest moment,” he said. “I dumped 20 cents in November 2018 and netted a dollar off that investment.”

In general, Cage’s predictions weren’t much better than if he had chosen at random. “It was a useful ego check, as, for the most part, I wasn’t very good,” he told me. But as he kept betting, he noticed bet after bet with odds that seemed completely off. According to Cage, in the spring of 2019, for example, the PredictIt market gave former FBI Director James Comey a 1-in-4 chance of being indicted in the next six months. Cage had never heard anything about a Comey indictment on the news.

“My first assumption was I must have missed something,” he said. Cage searched but couldn’t find any legitimate articles or even Google groups talking about Comey committing federal crimes. Then he checked Breitbart and other far-right sites. Still nothing. So he made a bet that Comey would not be indicted. And he kept seeing these strange bets: Would a federal charge against Hillary Clinton come by a certain date? What about one against Barack Obama?

The curious thing was that these bets were so consistent. It’s not unusual for an article or tweet to come out and temporarily create unexpected wagers. But day after day, month after month, people were betting on these weird theories. Every six months, a new version of the Clinton-indictment bet came up, and every six months, people bet that she would be charged.

Renée DiResta: Right-wing social media finalizes its divorce from reality

That’s when Cage started paying attention to the PredictIt comments sections, where people were posting snippets of what looked like nonsense to him. And that’s how, years before most people had heard of QAnon, Cage learned that Q is an anonymous figure who claims to have a high-level security clearance and access to inside information about a devil-worshipping deep state.

All of a sudden, the bets made sense: QAnon followers believed that Q had special inside information about the future, and they bet accordingly.

“There were people who were so convicted in these beliefs that they were willing to put hundreds or thousands on the line,” Cage said. “So I started shoveling more and more money in.”

Cage began scanning PredictIt for QAnon theories and betting against them. He’d look for anything weird—usually something like suspiciously high odds that a Democrat would be indicted. Then he researched to make sure he hadn’t missed something in the news cycle. “If I saw conspiracy-theory chatter in the comments section of Google News articles, that was a plus for me,” Cage said.

When he couldn’t find any legitimate news on the bet, he’d dive into QAnon YouTube channels or message boards. If he determined that people were following a QAnon theory, he’d bet against them. Cage has made money every time QAnon has been wrong—which they have been on every bet he’s made so far, he told me. He’s put about $800 in and made around $400 in profits.

When Cage discovered what was going on, he suddenly had information most Americans didn’t have, a sort of real-time look at just how popular QAnon was becoming, down to the dollar. And now, the theory has expanded to a worldview: “It’s beyond Q at this point,” Cage said. QAnon believers swap conspiracy theories back and forth, welcoming people who are against vaccinations, people who believe the moon landing was faked, and people who follow just about every other conspiracy theory into their community.

Trump’s embrace of bizarre conspiracy theories about voter fraud has had similar effects. “It’s actually kind of alarming how delusional prediction markets are,” Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight, tweeted right after the election. “They give Trump a 12% chance of winning Nevada, a state that has been called for Biden and where he has a fairly large lead, and where there is no coup possibility since it’s run by Democrats.”

As of mid November, PredictIt still gave Trump about a 15 percent chance of winning the presidential election, even though major networks had already declared Biden the president-elect days before. These bets might be related to QAnon, too: Believers were convinced that Trump would win the election and start making mass arrests of Democrats. Some QAnon believers might still be betting as though that were the case.

Read: QAnon is winning

Cage said people become wrapped up in conspiracy theories slowly, then all at once. A lot of people get involved with QAnon through another, more palatable conspiracy theory. A mother might join a Facebook parenting group and get drawn in by an anti-vaxxer post. Then she finds her way to other, weirder ideas.

That’s ultimately what’s so tricky about QAnon and its related world: It’s not one clearly defined group of people screaming insane theories into a dark corner of the Internet. It’s a mist quietly settling over society, and people often don’t realize they’re breathing it in. But somewhere, on the other side of Cage’s PredictIt bets, real people are losing money because they believe fervently in the predictive powers of an anonymous message-board poster.

Ilana E. Strauss is a journalist and podcaster interested in the unwritten rules of the human world. Her work has also appeared in New York magazine, Popular Science, PolitiFact, and other outlets.

 

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www.theatlantic.com /ideas/archive/2020/05/shadowland-introduction/610840/

The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning

Jeffrey Goldberg
7-9 minutes

Illustration by Erik Carter

Friday prayers at the Mustafa Mahmoud Mosque, Cairo, September 21, 2001. Two thousand worshippers, some tense, some angry, some oblivious to the grim new reality. The preacher, Ahmed Youssef, vented his anger in two directions: at al-Qaeda (“gangsters,” he called them), and at the United States, which he described as a paragon of hypocrisy.

The founder of the mosque, Mustafa Mahmoud himself, displayed no such complexity. I met him after prayers. He was an old man, a famous physician and philanthropist, and an Islamist of influence. His television show, Science and Faith, was watched by millions.

“I understand you want the answer,” Mahmoud said. His aides had already shared with him some of my questions, which included: Why did al-Qaeda attack America? What is the cause of their rage?

I said, Yes, I want the answer.

“Waco,” he said. I’m sure I looked baffled. Mahmoud went on, “The Branch Davidians attacked the World Trade Center, the McVeigh people. The Mossad gave them help. Did you know that the Israelis who work at the World Trade Center were told to stay home that day?” This, he said, he knew from the internet.

It was only 10 days after the attacks, and the schematic of a convoluted 9/11 conspiracy theory was already being rendered across the web. Mahmoud told me that no Arab could have executed the attacks, because Arabs “aren’t coordinated enough to do this.”  

“What does bin Laden know about American air travel, anyway?” he asked. “He lives in Afghanistan.” Mahmoud was strident in his conspiracism, except that his arguments, to him, weren’t conspiracy theories at all, but provable, credible truth, hidden from honest men by perfidious schemers. In a column published before the 9/11 attacks in Al-Ahram, the largest state-directed newspaper in Egypt, Mahmoud had described the nature of the deepest threat to civilization: “What exactly do the Jews want? Read what the Ninth Protocol of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ says: ‘We have limitless ambitions, inexhaustible greed, merciless vengeance and hatred beyond imagination. We are a secret army whose plans are impossible to understand by using honest methods.’”

Read: The coronavirus conspiracy boom

By the time of the attacks, Egypt had entered a state of civic decomposition. The people loathed their leaders, and the leaders feared their citizens. Ordinary Egyptians were impotent in the face of universal corruption and cynicism, periodic food shortages, political repression, and profound economic insecurity. In this climate, people who were legitimately flummoxed by the complexity of the modern world found in conspiracy thinking a comprehensible explanation for their unhappiness. Anti-Semitism, often manifesting itself in the form of the Protocols, a century-old Russian forgery that posited the existence of a Jewish plan for global domination, was one tool used by the powerful to direct anger away from the governments that failed them. Countries “where vicious anti-Semitism is rife are almost always backward and poor,” Walter Russell Mead once wrote. They aren’t backward and poor, he argued, because the Elders of Zion have conspired against them; they are backward and poor because they lack the ability to “see the world clearly and discern cause and effect relations in complex social settings.”

The Middle East is a cauldron of conspiracy, a place where the most bizarre theories often have real policy consequences. Saul Lieberman once said, “Nonsense is nonsense but the history of nonsense is scholarship.” I would add: The influence of nonsense, when unchecked by science, by direct observation, by a shared epistemological reality, can be profoundly damaging.

Eight years later, in a windowless Austin, Texas, warehouse, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was explaining to me why he, like Mustafa Mahmoud, disbelieved the investigated and proven truth of what happened on 9/11. Jones is a top-tier conspiracist, a professional one, too, and I visited him at his headquarters to find out for myself if he actually believed the idiocy he peddled—that the government controls the weather; that Bill Gates is secretly a genocidal eugenicist. The list of absurdities has no end. It always seemed outlandish to me that otherwise smart people (Mustafa Mahmoud was one of Egypt’s leading physicians) could sincerely believe in theories that stand in opposition to logic, Occam’s razor, and accreted fact. My assumption about people like Jones was that they were nihilistic grifters, exploiting innocent people seeking to satiate the deep human need for coherence.

Jones told me he was busy; I could have 30 minutes. Four hours later he was still talking—we were having dinner at a Mexican restaurant by then—and I was looking for an exit. He was nuts, and therefore exhausting. It was an afternoon filled with statements like this: “We’re living under tyranny. The bankers, the New World Order, they’re using the War Powers Act to grab our guns. This isn’t a republic. Come on, if you say the bankers are forcing fluoride on us, if you call 9/11 an inside job, they’ll destroy your life, that’s how evil they are.”

I had spent years in the Middle East listening to complicated nonsense, and I was familiar with the long and dismal history of Russian conspiracy-mongering. It was always a relief to know that in the United States, conspiracism was usually—not always, but usually—a marginal phenomenon. Men like Jones were more often than not a source of bemusement, not a cause for fear. Healthy societies develop antibodies to protect themselves from fantastical thinking, and America, democratic, free, and transparent, was a healthy society.

I was wrong, of course.

“Your reputation is amazing,” Donald Trump told Jones in late 2015. “I will not let you down.”

Read: Trump needs conspiracy theories

And he hasn’t. Trump does not defend our democracy from the ruinous consequences of conspiracy thinking. Instead, he embraces such thinking. A conspiracy theory—birtherism—was his pathway to power, and, in office, he warns of the threat of the “deep state” with the ferocity of a QAnon disciple. He has even begun to question the official coronavirus death toll, which he sees as evidence of a dark plot against him. How is he different from Alex Jones, from the conspiracy manufacturers of Russia and the Middle East?

He lives in the White House. That is one main difference.

This improbable question—how did a person with a weakness for conspiratorial thinking achieve the presidency?—might be among the most consequential of the coming election, which is not merely a political contest, but a referendum on Enlightenment values and on reality itself.  

Nonsense is nonsense, except when it kills. And conspiracy thinking, especially when advanced by the president of the United States, is an existential threat.

Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor in chief of The Atlantic and a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Reporting. He is the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror.

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www.theatlantic.com /technology/archive/2020/10/why-multilevel-marketing-and-qanon-go-hand-hand/616885/

This Will Change Your Life

Kaitlyn Tiffany
19-24 minutes

Jordan Schrandt—blond, beautiful, mother of eight, founder of The Farmhouse Movement magazine, which teaches readers how to achieve “a lifestyle of authenticity, simplicity, and kindness”—is a Royal Crown Diamond.

Less than 1 percent of the independent distributors who sell essential oils and related products through the Utah-based multilevel-marketing company Young Living reach that top ranking. Those who have net an average annual income of $1.5 million and resemble celebrities within the organization, counting tens of thousands of followers on social media. Their success sometimes even allows them to charge for access to advice on how to become more like them—a private Facebook group for business coaching from Schrandt costs $10 a month, and the cheapest single ticket for a recent “Diamond Bound” conference she hosted in Dallas was $309.

On a Friday night in March, Schrandt shared a revelation on one of her Facebook pages. “I’m awake!” she announced. President Donald Trump would soon prove that he had been Q all along, she wrote, and this was just the beginning of a “spiritual war” in defense of all that is good. The post continued for hundreds of words about the evils of the mainstream media and the mythology of QAnon, which holds that Trump is a warrior taking on a global ring of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, who are also in cahoots with the “deep state,” and tend to be Democratic politicians, Hollywood celebrities, or the owners of seemingly random small businesses. The post has since disappeared, but not before it went out to nearly 13,000 of Schrandt’s Facebook followers—in her post she notes that she had already sent the information to “1,000 or so” of them privately. (Schrandt suggested that Facebook removed the post; Facebook declined to comment.)

The Concordia University researcher Marc-André Argentino has a name for people like Schrandt: “Pastel QAnon.” These women—they are almost universally women—are doing the work of sanitizing QAnon, often pairing its least objectionable elements (Save the children!) with equally inoffensive imagery: Millennial-pink-and-gold color schemes, a winning smile. And many of them are members of multilevel-marketing organizations—a massive, under-examined sector of the American retail economy that is uniquely fertile ground for conspiracism. These are organizations built on foundational myths (that the establishment is keeping secrets from you, that you are on a hero’s journey to enlightenment and wealth), charismatic leadership, and shameless, constant posting. The people at the top of them are enviable, rich, and gifted at wrapping everything that happens—in their personal lives, or in the world around them—into a grand narrative about how to become as happy as they are. In 2020, what’s happening to them is dark and dangerous, but it looks gorgeous.

Over the summer, as networks of women on Instagram and Facebook stoked outrage over the Netflix debut of the French film Cuties, a movie about the exploitation and sexualization of young girls, Schrandt was among those who urged followers to cancel their Netflix accounts to avoid “supporting pedophilia.” Conspiracy theories about the pandemic have also spread through these groups; Schrandt recently suggested that contact-tracing programs were a plot to turn the United States into a communist country, and on one of her Instagram accounts, which has 22,000 followers, she explained that masks were “about mind control.” Distrust of the mainstream media and paranoia about the liberal bias of major internet companies are a common overtone in these circles as well—when telling her followers to watch ShadowGate, a misinformation-riddled “documentary” about a global plot against Trump, Schrandt was careful not to say the title outright, instead spelling it out via clues, and reminding followers to look for it on the alternative search platform DuckDuckGo instead of Google. (Though this is not particularly common in QAnon circles, Schrandt has also suggested that the Earth may be flat.)

Schrandt declined to be interviewed for this story beyond telling me that her posts were “completely genuine,” directing me to a Young Living spokesperson, and later signing off with a polite “Hugs, Jordan.” In a recent Instagram video, she talks straight to the camera, with a light-sepia filter smoothing away contours of the bones in her face. “I’ve literally built my brand and my businesses on being real and genuine and a thinker,” she says somberly. “An independent thinker.”

Young Living has not endorsed QAnon in any way, but it doesn’t appear eager to stop its biggest stars from endorsing it. “As a company, we do not have the right to censor the personal, political, religious views or opinions of our independent distributors, employees, or customers, unless it is directly related to Young Living,” a spokesperson told me in an emailed statement. Asked what the company’s response would be in the case of a Young Living distributor posting about QAnon and referencing their Young Living affiliation in the post, the spokesperson said, “We would reach out to remind the distributor that while they may share personal or political beliefs, they are not to do so in association with Young Living.” The spokesperson declined to comment on any specific situations, including Schrandt’s March post.

Young Living is a $1.5 billion brand, according to its most recent revenue report, and it is notorious for swirling together fact and fiction. It was founded in 1994 by Gary Young, an alternative-medicine advocate who had previously been convicted of posing as a health practitioner, and his wife, Mary Young—and it has developed a reputation for being particularly “cult-like,” a phrase used in a 2019 class-action lawsuit against it. The company has also regularly pushed the boundaries with claims about its products, and was warned by the FDA in 2014 not to imply that essential oils can serve as a treatment for the Ebola virus. More recently, Business Insider reported that some Young Living distributors had been advertising essential oils on social media as potential cures for COVID-19. (In a statement, a Young Living spokesperson said that distributors are “wholly prohibited” from making these claims, and that the company has been taking “corrective action” when they do so.)

“Direct selling” was a $35 billion industry last year, propped up by 6.8 million sellers in the United States. These sellers—who are 74 percent women, according to an industry analysis—typically buy products from the company at a “wholesale” price (in many cases much higher than the language would suggest) and then sell them through their social networks. In multilevel-marketing organizations, each new person who joins is assigned a mentor who is slightly higher up than they are, with whom they’re required to share a portion of their profits. Money runs up from the base of the, uh, triangle, through what’s called an upline. It is notoriously difficult—sometimes nearly impossible—to make money with direct selling if you enter the company once the top ranks are filled and the only room is at the bottom. Last year, Young Living claimed to have more than 3 million members worldwide, and 89 percent of those distributors hadn’t moved up the sales ranks at all, netting an average annual income of $3. Meanwhile, women like Jordan Schrandt are at the tippy top, which means that there are likely at least thousands of women beholden to her in some way—watching from afar as she posts about her success, and giving her a chunk of their income.

Julie, 46, became a member of Young Living in 2015. Some money from her sales and purchases gets tossed up the ladder—through several rungs—until it reaches Melissa Poepping, a Royal Crown Diamond who was apparently captivated by the Wayfair conspiracy theory in July. “Tell me it’s just a crazy theory. It’s not,” Poepping wrote. She also directed her 18,000 followers to go to Etsy’s website and search for listings that could be fronts for child trafficking, tagging the post “#darktolight,” a popular QAnon slogan. (Julie asked to go by only her first name, out of concern about professional consequences. Poepping did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

“I don’t really like contributing to Melissa’s bottom line,” Julie said. She believes Poepping’s posts are particularly dangerous because of her high rank in Young Living. “When you see leadership posting these things, there are people who just accept it, because they’ve trusted and accepted what these leaders have said in the past on other things.” Later, she added, “[These women] have a target audience out of the box. It’s different than just, like, someone’s cousin posting something.”

The multilevel-marketing industry isn’t just structurally conducive to spreading outlandish ideas: It also has some philosophical crossover with QAnon. “I can’t say that I’m surprised by ties between QAnon and multilevel marketing,” William Keep, a marketing professor at the College of New Jersey who started studying the industry in the 1990s, told me. “Unfortunately, their popularity and shared sympathy make some sense.” The industry has been at odds with governments “literally for decades,” Keep said. It loathes oversight and regulation. It loves a direct sales pitch. Many multilevel-marketing companies have had close ties to conservative politics, and many have antagonistic relationships with bodies like the FDA, or the idea of authority in general, in cases where products are marketed in ways that flout scientific consensus or medical expertise.

“[Multilevel-marketing companies] claim to sell the way they do, within these networks, because their products are so special or revolutionary that the mainstream marketplace can’t handle it ... the FDA would never approve this company,” says Jane Marie, who hosts and produces The Dream, a podcast about multilevel marketing. “I think it lines up really well with the QAnon attitude of, like, the government doesn’t want you to know this.”

And while the industry started offline, it is now reliant on its top sellers’ social networks. Success is dependent on incessant sharing, particularly on Instagram and Facebook. Where once a person’s downline would be people who lived near them, or were proximate to them through church or family connections, now, a person who is high up in an organization can reach people all over the country, and their social-media brand does all the work.

In 2015, when Kristen, a 49-year-old who lives in Minnesota, joined Young Living, she was added to a slew of Facebook groups, meeting tons of new people, and absorbing a lot of advice about how best to use the products. Now, she’s startled by how often she sees these same people sharing QAnon conspiracy theories on their pages. “When people join these [Facebook] groups, they want to be friends with the leaders of the groups,” she said. Though QAnon and other conspiracy theories don’t tend to turn up in the groups themselves—which are usually tightly associated with the Young Living brand—many members form secondary networks outside of them by friending or following each other.

“You’ve got these people who are really making a lot of money in the company, and people want to emulate them ... They have a ton of people following them, not just people in their downlines, but people from across the company who want their success.” In her experience, this is where the combination becomes toxic: A habit of believing information you see shared on social media collides with faith in the lovely and successful women who seem to know all. (She asked to go by her first name, out of concern about harassment from QAnon believers.)

“I don’t know the percentage of Young Living people who are in this,” she told me. “What I do know is the percentage of the people that I met through Young Living that are into it. And I would guess it’s like 75 percent.”

In August, Facebook announced a set of policy changes that would minimize QAnon’s “ability to organize.” Earlier this month, the company cracked down even further, saying it would remove Instagram accounts, Facebook groups, and Facebook pages devoted to QAnon, treating the group the way it would an extremist militia group. But the influencer model of QAnon benefits from a soft spot in the policy: Facebook will still allow individuals to express support for the movement on their personal pages. And now that social platforms have done serious work to remove the most obvious and most violent QAnon discussions, “Pastel QAnon” is perhaps the group with the largest, most uncontrolled reach. Many of the women you could sort into this category never explicitly use the word QAnon, or acknowledge where the information they’re parroting is coming from, and they are professionally trained to understand that the way they present themselves online is visible for broad scrutiny. They know exactly how to stay on a platform, how to avoid accountability, and how to captivate an audience, long term.

On Instagram, distributors for Arbonne, a multilevel-marketing company that sells a baffling number of skin-care and nutrition products, have been particularly active in promoting #SaveTheChildren—an anti-child-trafficking effort that has attracted thousands of ostensibly well-meaning people, but now runs primarily on conspiracy theories and bad information and is tightly entwined with QAnon. Cecilia Stoll, who has reached Arbonne’s top sales rank of Executive National Vice President, started discussing “elite pedophile rings” with her followers in July, then shared a screenshot of a Zoom call with many other Arbonne representatives, organizing to #SaveTheChildren. In August, she reposted a slideshow from the anonymous “Pastel QAnon” account Little Miss Patriot, which has been banned by Instagram several times and is now memorialized by a fan account. Along with nine other Arbonne distributors, all ranked National Vice President or above, she’s an administrator of the Facebook group “Operation Save Our Children.” (Stoll did not return multiple requests for comment; according to a post on her Instagram, the group has been disabled by Facebook.)

Many of the Arbonne representatives publicly supporting this cause seem unaware of its connection to QAnon, even when they use phrases like “darkness to light” and speculate about the complicity of “elites” and the media. Others appear to have been pulled further in. Allie Richards, an Arbonne distributor close to the bottom of the ladder, has been filling her Instagram Grid with cozy pictures of her dog, her boyfriend, her friends, and her Arbonne products, but her Stories were full of QAnon conspiracy theories this summer. Her “research” is fueled by Arbonne Herbal Detox Tea and Greens Balance powder, she notes. (Richards responded to an initial request for an interview, but not to subsequent attempts to schedule one. Later, when I asked why she had deleted some of her saved Stories, she said, “I deleted only [because] I don’t like social media, but everything that was in that [Story Highlight] I stand by.”)

Others make it difficult to tell how much they know about what they’re sharing. Miranda Burcham, a 43-year-old Arbonne Executive National Vice President, told me she’d been supportive of organizations that fight child trafficking for at least 10 years. During the pandemic shutdowns, she became more involved in Operation Underground Railroad—an organization that has no direct ties to QAnon but has become a favorite among the QAnon-adjacent. She emphasized that she was not speaking as a representative of Arbonne, before explaining her point of view: The media is writing off child trafficking as a conspiracy theory in general, and focusing on anything else but the kids.

When I noted that she was following, and had reposted screenshots from, one of the more popular QAnon accounts, she said that she found the account well researched and “very pro-American.” I asked how she felt about the theories the account shared, namely that cabals of Hollywood celebrities are drinking children’s blood. “I can’t guess if that’s true or not. I would hope it’s not true. However, I think there are many things wrong with the world that none of us are aware of, ” she told me. Asked how she feels about QAnon, she told me, “The only thing that I ever know about QAnon is that they’re patriotic.”

As with much conspiracy thinking, the spread of QAnon in these networks is not just dangerous, but also deeply sad. The grandiose promises of the QAnon worldview are mirrored and illuminated by the similar promises of multilevel marketing: equally false, and equally predicated on a desperate search for meaning and stability.

Alyssa Schmidt, a distributor for the multilevel-marketing company Monat, which sells hair products, blends these promises together expertly. Amid inspirational, aspirational posts about her experience with direct selling—tagged #bossbabe or showing off a new Cadillac—Schmidt also shares “the truth” on Pizzagate and the mainstream media’s campaign to “smear and censor” true journalists like her. (When I messaged her for this story, she said she had never mentioned QAnon on her page, adding, “You guys are nuts,” and threatening legal action.)

In a pinned Instagram Story, she talks about researching sex trafficking, posts in support of Donald Trump executing “child killers,” and then segues directly into a promotional post for Monat, writing, “If you need extra income, I cannot recommend this more … If you’re new around here, this is my ‘money-making’ gig that allows me to run my own schedule & fight sex trafficking.” The secret of attaining financial freedom is tied directly to uncovering all kinds of hidden truths about the world.

“You can fit any kind of message into the structures of a personal story,” Emily Hund, a social-media researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “It’s so much easier to weave things in when you’re just chatting, talking about yourself and your struggles and your stress levels and illnesses and essential oils and supplements … and your own beliefs and This is what works for me, you should look into it.

Multilevel marketing preys on the fact that the financial situation of the average person in the United States has gotten worse over the past several decades. So does the incentive structure of Instagram. “The influencer system in general is an open response to and a symptom of precarity,” Hund said. Many of the women who follow these influencers make little money with direct selling, and spend their time consuming stories and images created by people who seem to understand something important: You were born with all the potential you’ll ever need to become a millionaire, but the world has been hiding it from you. I’ll help you find it, these women promise. Then they’ll help you find other hidden truths, too. All the while, their livelihoods depend on your continued belief in everything they’re saying.

In one 2000 study of Amway distributors, researchers found that members of the multilevel-marketing company would generally only stay involved in the organization if they came to see it as part of their own identity. (I have not seen any Amway distributors promoting QAnon, but was curious about the emotional dynamics of the multilevel-marketing business structure in general.) They were actively encouraged to seek out mentor relationships and to assign meaning to their work. Crucial to this process was the act of “dream building,” and crucial to the longevity of their identification was that the dreams get bigger and bigger. Over time, the dreams tended to move beyond money, or lifestyle aspirations, or even helping one’s own family. “As these dreams evolved, they became more abstract, more difficult, and took longer to fulfill,” the organizational behavior researcher Michael Pratt wrote. “They also involved helping larger and larger numbers of people, such as ‘saving’ the United States and the world through selling Amway.”

The women who sit at the tops of multilevel-marketing companies’ triangular-shaped structures have all they could reasonably ask for when it comes to money and security; it seems that now they want something more spiritually satisfying. They want to save some children, inspire “free thinkers.” They want to change lives.

Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers technology.

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www.theatlantic.com /technology/archive/2020/05/great-5g-conspiracy/611317/

Something in the Air

Kaitlyn Tiffany
31-39 minutes

Photographs by Sarah Illenberger

I

n the 1970s, the bogeyman was power lines. Low-frequency electromagnetic fields were emanating from them all the time, and a shocking 1979 study suggested that children who developed cancer lived near power lines “unduly often.” Around the same time, because of Cold War panic about radiation in general, televisions and microwave ovens also became a possible human health catastrophe. Later, concern bubbled up around a slew of other household appliances, including hair dryers and electric blankets.

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Now the advance of cellphones and, more recently, the new high-speed networks built to serve them have given rise to a paranoid coalition who believe to varying degrees in a massive cover-up of deleterious harm. The devices are different, but the fears are the same: The radiation from the things we use every single day is destroying us; our modern world is a colossal mistake. The stakes are about as high as they could possibly be: If it were true that our cellphones were causing brain tumors, that our wireless devices were damaging our DNA, and that radiation emanating from cell towers was sickening us in any untold number of ways, this would be the greatest human health disaster the world has ever known. As well as, perhaps, its greatest capitalist conspiracy.

It’s too big to be true. The science is confusing, but the World Health Organization, noting decades of research, has found no significant health risks from low-level electromagnetic fields. Yet amid a broader tech backlash—against screens, against social media, against power consolidating in a handful of companies, against a technology industry that rolls out new products and protocols faster than we can keep up or argue with, against the general fatigue and malaise associated with a life spent typing and scrolling—it’s just big enough to seem, to many, like the obvious explanation for so much being wrong.

A wildly disorienting pandemic coming at the same time as the global rollout of 5G—the newest technology standard for wireless networks—has only made matters worse. “5G launched in CHINA. Nov 1, 2019. People dropped dead,” the singer Keri Hilson wrote in a now-deleted tweet to her 4.2 million followers in March. As the coronavirus spread throughout Europe, fears about 5G appear to have animated a rash of vandalism and arson of mobile infrastructure, including more than 30 incidents in the U.K. in just the first 10 days of April. In the case of one arson attack in the Netherlands, the words “Fuck 5G” were reportedly found scrawled at the scene. Mobile- and broadband-infrastructure workers have also reported harassment and threats from deluded citizens: A recent Wired UK report detailed an instance in which a London network engineer was spit on; he later contracted an illness that was suspected to be the coronavirus.

Read: The coronavirus conspiracy boom

While those theories are flat-Earth-level absurd, legitimate scientists have long been interested in a relationship between wireless technology and cancer, and tens of millions of dollars have been spent investigating it. Activists have lobbied politicians and government agencies, who have been thus compelled to address it. Mothers have always told their children not to stand in front of the microwave. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences published an overview of electromagnetic-radiation research in 1975, acknowledging the public’s concern about how quickly “technologic advances” were moving along, resulting in the use of “electromagnetic emitting equipment … in medicine, industry, research, military systems, and the home.”

The wildest thing about baseless coronavirus and 5G theories is that they’re barely part of the story—they’re just the latest headline.

The ranks of the 5G-skeptical include environmental activists, politicians, celebrities, and fringe scientists. In 2015, 190 scientists, doctors, and engineers from about 40 countries sent an appeal to the United Nations, urging the World Health Organization to reconsider the international guidelines for human exposure to the kind of radiation emitted by cellphones and other wireless technologies. In 2017, some of the same group co-signed a letter to the European Union asking that 5G rollout be put on hold pending further investigation. Though this community is far from mainstream, it is large. And it is powerful: In April 2019, Brussels stopped work on its 5G network, with the environmental minister of the region saying that citizens wouldn’t be treated as “guinea pigs.” A few cities and towns in Northern California have passed ordinances to curb 5G deployment, explicitly because of health concerns, and three members of Congress have written to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai about their constituents’ worries over 5G safety.

Last fall, the activist group NYC 5G Wake-Up Call hosts Patti Wood, the executive director of the national nonprofit Grassroots Environmental Education—founded by Wood and her husband in 2000 to address issues including pesticides, GMOs, fluoridated water, fracking, and synthetic turf—for an event about the ills of wireless technology. The venue is a church in Midtown Manhattan, and the audience is rowdy and simmering with anger—at the telecom companies, at the government agencies that are supposed to protect us, at the scientists who ignore the work of other scientists.

With white hair and a severe laugh, Wood is a woman you’d gravitate toward in the midst of disaster. “You have no rights. These are involuntary exposures,” she tells the 30 or so attendees. “But we need it in order to use our fun little toys,” she shoots at the crowd, many of whom have been on their phone the whole time she’s been talking.

The FCC, the FDA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency are supposed to protect our health, Wood says, but they’re failing. People are suffering from electromagnetic hypersensitivity—a condition also known as “microwave sickness,” with symptoms including fatigue, dizziness, and nausea—but they’re afraid to talk about it. “These are not ‘wacko’ people. These are principals of schools, and doctors who work in emergency rooms—I’m just giving you examples of people—people who work in the IT business,” she says. “You see a lot of health-care professionals who are dealing with this. And yet, nobody’s really talking about it. Nobody’s talking about it. It’s like nobody talks about vaccinations, you know, because nobody wants them to think that ‘I’m a crazy, I’m an anti-vaxxer.’” (Wood later says she’s not an anti-vaxxer. Grassroots Environmental Education says it has never taken a public stance on vaccines.) “It’s all about power,” she says, encouraging activists in the room to band together to exert political influence.   

As with any argument about injustice and capitalist conspiracy, it is easy to flirt with believing for moments or hours at a time. Wireless technology could be slowly killing us all, or at least it could be slowly killing some of us (as other profitable things have done from time to time), or at least it could be true that we aren’t sure, and are moving ahead recklessly. In the 50 or so years since Americans started eyeing our microwaves with suspicion, we’ve been introduced to a parade of new products so quickly it’s hard to feel as if we ever had a choice. In 2020, the average person doesn’t get to decide whether she wants a smartphone or an email account or a home computer: They’re the default, the instruments we all need to live a functional life. In the case of 5G, the lack of agency is even more obvious. The infrastructure is being built whether we want it or not. So at some level, the conversation becomes not about the technology itself, but about the fact that ordinary people don’t feel as though they had any personal say. And sometimes, in fumbling for lost agency, people grab on to conspiracy theories.

Read: If someone shares the “Plandemic” video, how should you respond?

“The fact that the fields produced by electric current … were both invisible and ubiquitous, that exposure was largely beyond one’s control, and that the alleged health consequences were depicted as catastrophic helps to account for the intense fear that came to be associated with [the] question in the public mind,” the cancer epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat writes in his 2008 book, Hyping Health Risks. He compares looking for evidence of a relationship between various forms of electromagnetic radiation and brain cancer to looking for shapes in the clouds: It’s easy to see something, if that’s what you really want to do.

One of the most careful voices of reason in the debate about electromagnetic fields is the epidemiologist David Savitz. He stresses that “there’s not really been a clear indication that there is a problem” with Wi-Fi, but acknowledges the validity of the concern. As far as any individual fear is understandable, fear of cellphones makes sense: They went from basic nonexistence to ubiquity in about a decade. Now nearly every public urban place has Wi-Fi, and we will soon have small cell towers every few blocks. Whether or not you believe this will give you brain cancer, you didn’t have a chance to opt out. And if there is anything—even anecdotal evidence—to suggest that it might cause cancer, that can be uniquely terrifying.

“To be honest, I don’t think research can ever put [the concern] to rest,” Savitz tells me. “It can bound it. It can raise or lower the level of concern. But … when we do nothing, there are legitimate questions in the order of Who knows what it does?

Activists tend to cite the existence of “hundreds” or even “thousands” of studies that prove a connection between low-level radiation and various adverse health effects. They aren’t wrong about the volume of research. They aren’t even wrong that some of the studies find what they’re looking for. What is impossible to say in a sentence is that they find any one thing in particular, and no evidence supports the idea that global industry and governments have made a concerted effort to keep shocking findings from the public.

Work that points to dangerous connections between electromagnetic radiation and negative human health outcomes tends to ignore much of what we know about electromagnetic waves and the way they interact with the body. Though the word radiation always conjures up a little something frantic in the gut, there is a diverse spectrum of electromagnetic waves, with big differences among them. Gamma rays and X-rays—waves with very short wavelengths and very high photon energies—can cause cellular damage because they can knock electrons out of atoms. It is very bad to be exposed to them for extended periods.

But current wireless technology uses fields in the microwave range, and the FCC sets limits for radiofrequency exposure from cellphones well below the line at which we would expect heating to happen in human tissue. In 1991, the Yale physicist Robert K. Adair wrote in Physical Review that “there are good reasons to believe” that weak fields “can have no significant biological effect at the cell level—and no strong reason to believe otherwise.”

The best evidence that electromagnetic radiation does not cause brain cancer is simple: We have been placing antennae on our bodies and next to our heads almost 24 hours a day for two decades, and the world has not seen an epidemic of brain cancer. In fact, in the U.S., the rate of new brain-cancer cases was lower in 2017 than in 1992.

For years, scientific attempts to find a meaningful relationship between brain cancer and cellular radiation have failed. For 13 years starting in 1982, scientists followed every adult in Denmark who had a cellphone plan—420,000 people. In the end, they found no evidence at all of an association between brain tumors and cellphone use.

In 2010, the World Health Organization released the results of a decade-long international case-control study. The study’s 48 authors took more than four years to decide how to interpret the data, and it’s easy to see why: The findings were simultaneously explosive and meaningless. The participants who held their phone to their head most often had a 40 percent increase in risk for developing a glioma—absolutely shocking, and significant. But the group with the second-highest use showed, bafflingly, one of the lowest risks for glioma.

The science remained muddy.

In 2018, the largest-ever study of cellphones and brain cancer, conducted by the U.S.’s National Toxicology Program, tested rats at high-level, full-body exposures—far higher than the average cellphone user would experience. It found “clear evidence” that cellphone exposure was correlated with malignant heart tumors in male rats (but not females), and “some evidence” that exposure was correlated with gliomas and adrenal-gland tumors in male rats (but not females).

Read: Why conspiracy videos work so well on YouTube

One of the biggest challenges of studying brain cancer is that it is very rare. An association between a brain tumor and anything at all would be incredibly difficult to prove, even if the association existed. But there is a reason that the question keeps getting asked and the studies keep getting funded: In addition to being rare, brain cancers are exceptionally deadly. Only one in three people who are diagnosed with brain cancer will be alive five years later.

One afternoon, I attend a NYC 5G Wake-Up Call meeting in a prewar co-op on Manhattan’s Museum Mile, overlooking Central Park. When I arrive, five women are sitting in a ring around the edge of a sun-dappled sitting room. They’ve all brought stacks of paper—printouts of studies and reports and pamphlets, along with a couple of sheets that are just lists of video links.

The meeting’s host, Stephanie Low, has been an activist for 20 years, working against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, fracking, and, now, wireless technology of all sorts. “I only work on things that are enormous horrors,” she says. She hands me a business card, one of 1,000 she had printed to hand out to parents around the city when she sees them giving their young children a cellphone to play with. The card depicts a cartoon child with a smart meter—which emit electromagnetic radiation—hovering near their throat and a cellphone near their brain, next to a stop sign and a note: “Protect Your Kids! Studies show that the developing brains of children from conception to teenage years can be damaged by cell phone use. To be safe, even casual play should be prevented.”

Last June, Low finished treatment for pancreatic cancer. A few months before, she’d become personally involved in the wireless issue because of a friend who is electro-hypersensitive. This friend had lived a normal life in New York City—until her landlord installed 25 smart meters in the building without warning. She didn’t sleep for five nights, Low says, and had to come stay with her.

Three weeks later, Low’s friend was in excruciating pain again whenever she moved. She started living in Low’s guest bathroom, the only place that felt slightly less like a frying pan. Eventually, she moved upstate. A week after she left, Low found out that her building had installed smart meters in its basement too, a fact she relays with her eyes burning a hole through the floor at her feet.

The WHO has a very long informational page about electromagnetic hypersensitivity. It is clearly written to be careful about stories like Low’s friend’s, describing the suffering as real but the idea that a person with EHS can specifically detect and feel electromagnetic-field exposure as suspect. “EHS is characterized by a variety of non-specific symptoms that differ from individual to individual. The symptoms certainly are real and can vary widely in their severity,” it reads. Then, “EHS has no clear diagnostic criteria and there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF exposure. Further, EHS is not a medical diagnosis, nor is it clear that it represents a single medical problem.”

The friend, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from the telecom industry, calls us from upstate and retells the story, adding, “We’re truth detectives, sorting propaganda from reality.”

Of the thousands of isolated bits of pop-culture ephemera floating around TikTok, one of the stickiest is a clip of Khloé Kardashian berating her sister Kourtney in an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians that aired in the summer of 2016.

“What the fuck is up with your Wi-Fi?” she demands, walking around her sister’s basketball court with a phone outstretched. “You have this big-ass house and you can’t afford a Wi-Fi box out here?”

“It’s not about affording …” Kourtney tells her, looking up from her phone, as if exhausted by the never-ending chore of explaining the world to a slightly younger adult sibling. Then, pinching the air under her chin, emphasizing each syllable as if she’s teaching phonetics: “It’s about … radiation.” This does nothing to console Khloé—in fact, it seems to offend her on a moral level—and she screams, “You’re going to die anyway; you understand that, right? Die with a good Snapchat going through!”

Though the young people ripping the audio for a 15-second joke probably consider Kourtney the butt of it, a fair number of rich and famous Californians likely side with her. Fran Drescher is best known for her starring role as the titular nanny in The Nanny, but she has spent the past 15 years talking about all sorts of things that could cause cancer, including EMFs. Drescher calls me from her car one Saturday afternoon, using speakerphone but not Bluetooth—Bluetooth turns your car into a microwave, she says. The American people are enabling the “greedy sociopaths” of the tech and telecom industries, she argues, and we should be expressing our opinions with our dollars. We can’t just sit back and let them use us as guinea pigs. She speaks at the clip of a podcast on 3x playback for most of the conversation, but her voice dips low and a little mournful before we hang up. “We are part of this planet,” she tells me. “And we are harmonic with it. We are in disharmony with electromagnetic fields.”

The model Miranda Kerr, who is married to Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, told a beauty-magazine editor that she uses an EMF detector to monitor “the waves in the air,” and that she installed a kill switch to turn off the Wi-Fi and all the electricity at night (save for the refrigerator and security cameras) in her Malibu house. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, said last year that he owns a small sauna with an EMF-shielding tent, to protect him from radiation when he wants to relax. (“It feels a little bit different because you’re not getting hit by all the EMF energy,” he explained on a podcast.)

Indeed, as with all fears, you can buy things to ease your mind: Belly Armor, recently featured in People magazine, sells blankets lined with RadiaShield Fabric “to protect your reproductive organs from exposure to cell phones, laptops and other smart devices while at home or at the office,” as well as radiation-deflecting mouse-shaped baby hats to protect babies’ brains once they’re outside the womb. Companies like Less EMF sell silver-threaded fabric, polyester window film, and carbon paint, which are often used by people who want to block electromagnetic radiation from their homes.

Heather Askinosie, a co-founder of the California jewelry company Energy Muse, approaches the same problem by selling, among other things, well-designed products made with a mostly carbon mineraloid called shungite. “Two years ago we really started selling a lot of shungite to people who were more in tune with EMFs and looking for other modalities of how to harmonize,” she tells me in a phone call. “More and more people are becoming EMF sensitive. Will shungite protect you from an EMF? I don’t have the research to say that it will. But I do think that will harmonize those waves so that you have more of a harmonious energy coming at you.”

The supremacy of wireless technology in American daily life is, really, a capitalist plot—at least insofar as the best way to protect yourself from anything is with money. The No. 1 seller in Askinosie’s shop is a rectangular shungite sticker ($9.95) that goes on the back of a cellphone case and protects “your energy against EMFs.” Second is a shungite phone stand ($34.95), and third is a shungite plate ($14.95), to set any kind of electronic device on. (“By placing your devices on a Shungite Plate, the Shungite stone properties minimize the EMFs emitted by technology.”)

The California-based lifestyle brand GIA Wellness offers the typical roster of skin-care products and meal-replacement protein powders alongside a range of Lifestyle Energy Products, including a $64.95 cellphone case that was designed in part “to help support your body’s natural resistance to the stress-related effects of electropollution (EMF) exposure,” a pendant that serves a similar purpose for $312.50 (both use “Energy Resonance Technology,” a “proprietary process, custom programmed to resonate with, and support your body’s energy field”), and a “Home Harmonizer” that costs $234.50 and has been designed to “support an energetically harmonious environment” with up to a 60-foot radius.

“We have really profound results, which is the most exciting thing,” the company co-founder Lynda Cormier-Hanser says. “When people put a cell guard on their phone and they no longer have migraine headaches. That’s really rewarding when you hear those stories.”

When products alone don’t seem to have addressed the problem, there are also services on offer. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Building Biology Institute offers several types of home-inspector certifications, including one for electromagnetic-radiation specialists (a trademark-pending term). The coursework for that program costs $5,355, and requires a series of online classes, a correspondence course, three one-week sessions in person, plus a final project mentored by a current building biologist.

Inspecting an average 1,800-square-foot home with three to four bedrooms is usually a full day of work, the BBI-certified specialist Stephanie Kerst tells me, including four to six hours on-site and an hour or two of reporting and preparing recommendations for the client. Kerst charges $125 an hour for phone or Zoom consultations, and $150 an hour for in-person inspections.

“I’ve been doing this about two years now. And I would say, what I have noticed is just a steady increase in the number of clients,” she says in a phone call. “There’s so much work to go around.”

To believe that wireless technology is deadly, you can start by believing in a few simple, true things, and then go from there.

“There is so much dishonesty in this field, and people paid by the industry,” one activist tells me coolly, a few moments after we first shake hands. Then she looks at me as if she’s about to take notes on the muscles in my face. “You have to dig for the truth. But are you interested in the truth?”  

I am, which is how I end up reading a booklet by Norm Alster titled “Captured Agency,” subtitled “How the Federal Communications Commission Is Dominated by the Industries It Presumably Regulates.” It was published in 2015 and is a common reference point for activists. The accusations of corruption it contains are extreme, to say the least. Invoking “the hardball tactics of the tobacco industry,” Alster accuses the wireless industry of “bullying potential threats into submission,” and the FCC of allowing it to happen. The flamboyant prose, and the overreactions throughout the paper over minor connections and shared dinners, makes it rhetorically unpersuasive. But Alster is not wrong that the FCC has been accused, credibly, of blurring the lines between regulation and participation. “The path from a Commission seat to an aisle seat inside Comcast’s private jet and vice versa has been wide open for years,” the Verge editor in chief Nilay Patel wrote in his 2016 interview of the former FCC head Tom Wheeler.

There is an argument to be made that the FCC overreaches, removing community agency and consolidating power. In October, a federal court of appeals upheld the commission’s wildly unpopular repeal of net neutrality, but shot down its claim that states were not allowed to pass net-neutrality laws of their own. The court also criticized the FCC for a “disregard of its duty,” in failing to assess the ways in which eroding an open internet might affect public safety and emergency services. There are also valid criticisms surrounding 5G technology, many of which have been made repeatedly by prominent politicians and mainstream journalists. Even Wheeler, one of 5G’s most prominent hype men only a few years ago, has come out against the current FCC administration’s handling of 5G cybersecurity.

There are scientists involved in this discussion who are genuinely scary, Geoffrey Kabat says. The ones who want to imagine they’re saving the world, and call anyone who disagrees with them an industry shill. “The answers aren’t simple, and the science certainly isn’t simple, but they want to know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are,” he says. They want to be heroes, and they convince people that they are.

Our 5G lifestyle will be expensive and it will be vulnerable. It will probably enable unprecedented surveillance of public and private space, and it may grossly exacerbate the digital divide, as rural areas get left even further behind. You don’t have to think that small cell towers will kill you to think that they will look terrible when dispersed every few blocks; you don’t have to believe in any fringe science to be annoyed that 5G may interfere with weather satellites. 5G will definitely generate a lot of economic activity, but it won’t change the average person’s life. The Internet of Things is an ungraspable future, particularly when the fact of a future for Earth at all sometimes sounds implausible. There is no explanation for disease in the way that a person might want one, especially in the moment that she needs one.

The fear of some generalized capitalist conspiracy comes up, too, in Eula Biss’s 2014 book, On Immunity, which discusses the anti-vaccine movement. Biss spent years talking to fellow parents about their suspicions and fears, concluding that while these feelings can be easily justified, what they are most of all is sad: “That so many of us find it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children for money is evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us,” she writes.

In the case of anti-wireless activism, the scope of the conspiracy widens to the point where it becomes a worldview: Connectivity for connectivity’s sake was a mistake. Why are we carrying it around on our bodies? We could dial back, or we could stop moving so fast—we could stop ruining the night sky with satellites that will do nothing but bring super-fast internet to more people who will soon regret what it does to them.

On an afternoon in December, I have lunch with Ellen Osuna, who attended the NYC 5G Wake-Up Call meeting in Low’s apartment, and who I also saw hovering at the back of Patti Wood’s speech. She uses a landline phone, has an EMF-shielding headset for her cellphone, and owns a Chromebook that connects to the internet only through an ethernet cable, but we meet at a coffee shop in Manhattan.

“I think there should be hardly any places with Wi-Fi,” she says, when I ask how she feels about the café we’re sitting in, the city we live in. “There should be public access to ethernet.” I meant less specifically. How does she feel about the fact that nobody in here seems to be the slightest bit concerned? “It’s a really heavy thing to carry,” she says. “It’s surreal.”

She bristles when I suggest that some of the evidence is compelling for brain cancer, but none of it is for things like autism and Alzheimer’s. But she nods emphatically when I ask if the words some activists use—apocalypse, Holocaust, death ray—are frustrating for her to hear. These words don’t help; she cringes when they come up.

“Wireless is not like the fossil-fuel industries,” she says. “There is so much more brilliance. Amazing things are being done with technology.” But it is like the fossil-fuel industry in that “we’re completely entrenched. We’re addicted to it because of what these companies hid.”

Osuna sees herself as just one person doing one person’s part, which is talking to as many other people who will listen, doing her best to live a moral life, one that is tinged by grief. In the 1980s, when she was in middle school, a surfeit of scientific evidence proved the reality of climate change, she says, and she remembers her teacher telling her so. “We could have pulled back then, but we didn’t.” The fight against wireless technology is at that point now, she thinks. “This is the beginning.”

She is optimistic, she says. Or, more so than she was a few years ago, when it was much harder to find information about the dangers of wireless technology. “We can’t see this with the eye, but we are literally covered in this,” she says. “We’re trying to make the invisible visible.”

She’s not exaggerating the challenge of her task. When the WHO declared electromagnetic fields a class 2B carcinogen in 2011, with one doctor stating in a press release that there “could be some risk” of cancer from EMF exposure, it was effectively publishing a Rorschach test. Anti-wireless activists are quick to point out that group 2B also includes such poisonous-sounding substances as chloroform and lead. You could just as easily point out that the list also includes aloe vera, pickled vegetables, talc-based body powders, and dry cleaning, things that sound innocuous—but then again, Wi-Fi sounds innocuous too.

The second time I see Stephanie Low, she greets me warmly and presses me to take a photo of her optometrist’s business card on my phone—I mention that I’m trying to get glasses; I’m going blind from looking at my computer all day. And this reminds her of a theory she read that our vision is a hologram, as is the entire universe. She recommends a book that changed the way she thinks about everything—Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe—and adds that my local library likely has a copy.

So I read it one morning, wondering what comfort there might possibly be in conceiving of the world in a completely different way than I have all my life. The book is confusing, and it is beautiful. “There is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it—from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons—are also only ghostly images,” Talbot writes, “projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time.”

The theory that our memories are holographic, and that the world itself is holographic, is, he says, the one that explains such phenomena as near-death experiences, precognition, lucid dreams, the placebo effect, stigmata, miracles, psychics, psychokinetic powers, X-ray vision, and the paranormal. Every unanswered question. It explains the remarkable recovery of a 61-year-old throat-cancer patient, who “visualized his cancer cells as weaker and more confused than his normal cells,” and “his body’s white blood cells, the soldiers of the immune system, coming in, swarming over the dead and dying cancer cells.”

Talbot’s book is not a work of fiction, but extrapolates—wildly—from the real work of credible scientists. He died of chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 1992.

“In a holographic universe,” Talbot writes, “a universe in which separateness ceases to exist and the innermost processes of the psyche can spill over and become as much a part of the objective landscape as the flowers and the trees, reality itself becomes little more than a mass shared dream.”

The wholeness gets to me, as does the lowering of stakes. I see the appeal of a world that exists only as an illusion, yet knits our lives together into one shimmering image of continuity. We could be accountable to one another. We could have unlimited chances to erase pain. The theory comes from science—kind of, if you squint, and shove the puzzle pieces together slightly against their will. Imagine choosing to believe something impossible, over a reality that is also impossible: not hard.

In October, the WHO put out a call for systematic reviews of the relationship between electromagnetic fields and 10 different topics. This is a question that will be asked again and again and again. “By and large, the research is reassuring about there not being—certainly not a major problem, perhaps no problem at all in terms of adverse health effects,” David Savitz tells me.

But for a great number of the people asking, the concern isn’t about what holds true “by and large”—it’s about the way they’re living, what they’re feeling. They feel tired and sick; they sense that it is the result of modern life. All they’ve been asking for is some solid proof that it isn’t.

Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers technology.

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www.theatlantic.com /books/archive/2020/05/conspiracy-museum/610984/

The Conspiracy Museum

Robin Sloan
11-13 minutes

Photo illustrations by Kensuke Koike

REMARKS AS PREPARED BY WILLIAM K. SING, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SMITHSONIAN MUSEUM OF AMERICAN CONSPIRACY

FOR DELIVERY ON TUESDAY APRIL 16, 2041

Welcome, everyone. What an [INSERT WEATHER COMMENT] day to open a museum.

Behind me [GESTURE BEHIND SELF] is the Smithsonian Museum of American Conspiracy. Yes, it’s really there! I know it’s hard to see. The building is clad in the same light-bending mesh the Space Force uses for its stealth ships. There was a surplus. Lucky us.

This is an art museum. That’s important. Not a history museum, and not, as the Post has suggested, the Smithsonian’s second zoo. [PAUSE FOR IRONIC LAUGHTER] No, this new institution celebrates an art form. It’s a natural extension of the Smithsonian’s long-standing commitment to American folkways.

This might be the deepest, widest folkway of them all.

I’ll quote my colleague Helena Hwang, who calls conspiracy theories “the third great American art form, alongside jazz and superhero comics.” Maybe when Disney’s lobbyists finally allow those copyrights to expire, we can build a Smithsonian Museum of Superheroes next door. [PAUSE FOR RUEFUL LAUGHTER] Not likely.

This is a new kind of museum. Its collection extends into the exabytes, and it circulates continuously through our displays. The museum’s centerpiece, which you’ll see immediately upon entering, is the meme mosaic: a 21st-century quilt, two stories tall, constantly shifting. It is truly awful, in the original sense.

Inside, you will find a literal hall of mirrors. No visitor’s experience will be the same. You’ll learn about the tropes and techniques of an important art form, and you’ll encounter a kind of counter-history: a network of narratives that have established themselves in the tide-pool crevices between real events.

“Real events.” There. I did it, didn’t I?

Conspiracy theories are often compared unfavorably with the theories, nominally nonconspiratorial, of fields like physics and history. Now, as a historian, I do believe that the activities of these fields, and their output, are different. As a historian, I believe in rigor and, yes, even truth.

[DRAMATICALLY] But.

As a historian, I also follow in the footsteps of Thomas Kuhn, the 20th-century historian of science who observed that new paradigms arrive not, as scientists would like us to believe—and would like to believe themselves—through vigorous argumentation, in which [PRONOUNCE EXCLAMATION MARKS] minds! are! changed!, but in an altogether more human way: Old scientists retire. Young scientists enter the field. Slowly, surely, the lab turns over. This is the real structure of scientific revolutions.

The evolution of conspiracy theories isn’t so different. If anything, it’s faster!

Here’s a paradox:

1. No conspiracy-theory believer has ever been “talked out of” believing their chosen theory.

2. All conspiracy-theory believers, at some point, stop believing their chosen theory.

By what process, then, do the beliefs of conspiracy-theory believers change?

[PLAYFUL SPUTTERING] What, if not rational discourse, makes a conspiracy-theory believer drop the fluoride thing, the UFO thing, the “President Johnson is a robot” thing? What, if not argumentation? What, if not information?

Oh, the answer is better than you can imagine.

It’s boredom.

I’ll confess that my own intuitions around democracy have, for most of my life, associated political change with big, passionate feelings. Enthusiasm, fear, outrage: leviathans swimming powerfully through the body politic. I still believe that those feelings drive change, though the 21st century has not, so far, offered me much evidence. But here’s what else I believe. Here’s what I’ve learned: Boredom, too, is out there among the leviathans.

We should be thankful.

The old nuclear-power stations functioned by moderating the chain reaction of fissile material with neutron-absorbing “control rods” that could be raised and lowered. Raise them, and the naked uranium speaks more urgently to itself; lower them, and the chatter fades.

Boredom is the control rod of conspiracy, and maybe of democracy, too. Without boredom, I honestly think one of the stories in the museum behind me [GESTURE BEHIND SELF] might by now have destroyed this country.

[PAUSE TO LET SINK IN]

The Smithsonian Museum of American Conspiracy offers something uniquely urgent and relevant to the times we live in. A decade ago, I expected a war. With who? Anyone. Everyone! And I mean a real war—not one of our president’s graceful dances, with all the missiles exploding somewhere over the ocean. Great-power conflict has returned, but with … a calmness. Why? How?

I believe that this museum possesses the unlikely answer.

President Johnson’s post-Pyongyang global order runs, essentially, on conspiracy theory.

That’s not what the president calls it, of course. You know this administration’s foreign policy as Global Kayfabe. You might, additionally, know that the term is taken from professional wrestling.

Kayfabe: the presentation of staged events as real, with the understanding that the audience is in on it. Kayfabe: the eager suspension, on all sides, of disbelief.

Read: Trump is building a dystopia in real time

Of course, it makes sense that our president, who started his career in a wrestling ring, whose persona was formed there, has now adapted kayfabe to the biggest ring of them all.

Cards on the table: I am an avid lifelong fan of wrestling, including its international and independent variants. Professional wrestling led me to wrestling fan fiction, which led me to the history of collaborative storytelling, which led me to UCLA, which led me here.

So believe me when I tell you: Kayfabe is profoundly creative and communal. No fan of professional wrestling believes the fight they are watching is “real,” but out of enthusiasm and, just as important, etiquette, we act as if we do.

And the results are electric.

The secretary of state will tell you his boss deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for this innovation in international relations, in which conflicts are staged loudly but bloodlessly, and populist animus is satisfied safely by the geopolitical equivalent of elbow drops.

I don’t know if that’s true.

I do, however, believe that kayfabe is a conspiracy theory, and conspiracy theory, kayfabe. They both rely on the same eager suspension of disbelief; they both are fundamentally about creativity and community, not cold-eyed fact-finding; and they both are inscrutable, even contemptible, to observers outside the magic circle of their games.

Also, they’re both stunningly simple. Even as conspiracy theories play at spider-web vastness, their dramatis personae are as compact as a tag-team match.

Kennedy, Hoover, Fidel Castro.

Tupac, Biggie, Suge Knight.

Musk, Markle, Ocasio-Cortez.

Now, maybe, hearing me compare conspiracy theorizing to the healthy play of kayfabe, you feel a growing sense of unease. You should. Because, as we all know, conspiracy theories have other characters, too.

Lately, it’s the wealthy and wizened Mind of Soros, the autonomous digital imprint of the activist billionaire. Can AI be Jewish? According to the conspiracy theorists, it can.

These are the stories that become cover for pogrom and genocide. They are serious, and the museum behind me takes them seriously. There are rooms inside that are painful to navigate; they feel like being inside the folds of a diseased mind. I don’t recommend them to everyone.

But rather than abandon a great collaborative art form to this poison, I propose that we use this museum as a workshop to engineer its rescue.

An underappreciated characteristic of kayfabe—and, if you ask me, the primary reason the president’s Global Kayfabe has been so successful—is that its relations are never fixed.

Read: The lasting trauma of Alex Jones’s lies

One of the great thrills of professional wrestling is something called the “heel turn.” In wrestling terms, a “face” is a hero, while a “heel” is a villain. (There’s more to it than that, of course. Darth Vader from Star Wars is the ultimate heel, but he’s also the charismatic center of the universe. Anyone in the crowd born after 2020, you can substitute—my daughter tells me this is the right reference—Void Tha Goddess. You love to hate her. [PAUSE, LIKE AN OLD PERSON] Right?)

When a face becomes a heel—or, the opposite: when a heel is redeemed as a face—it’s like an atom’s radioactive decomposition in the heart of an old reactor. Energy is released. The world is transformed.

Even better, the process can repeat! There was an old wrestler known as the Undertaker—this is a figure etched deeply into my heart—who turned from heel to face, face to heel again, and back, and back again, 10 times. Maybe 11; it depends how you count. Endless transformations.

The best conspiracy theories are like that, too.

There are, I must inform you, a lot of aliens in the building behind me. [GESTURE BEHIND SELF] The Hall of Ancient Astronauts is my favorite part of the museum. To me, this is pure kayfabe: playful and inviting, flexible, an infinite game. The story of pyramid-building extraterrestrials can absorb anything and anyone you throw at it.

Mayan temples. Spy satellites.

Jesus of Nazareth. Beyoncé of Houston.

In this kind of storytelling, there’s a beautiful syncretism. It offers a model of American conspiracy theorizing that is not about unalterable qualities, but rather processes in motion. Endless transformations.

You also see this quality in the conspiracy theory about President Johnson and his brawny robot doubles. I like that one a lot. I’ve recently seen it combined with another theory about an octopus civilization hidden near Antarctica: The robot is bait, intended to lure them into revealing themselves. Maybe that story will be in the museum one day.

[TURN TO LOOK AT MUSEUM]

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? You can almost make out its contours.

[TURN BACK TO AUDIENCE]

All right. I’ll abandon my kayfabe. There is no Smithsonian Museum of American Conspiracy behind me. No light-bending mesh. No two-story meme mosaic. It’s just the empty lot where FBI headquarters used to stand. We knocked that building down, but our opponents stopped us before we could lay a new foundation.

Those opponents said this museum’s contents would be too vile. That the most poisonous of these conspiracy theories had caused too much real suffering in the world. They said building an institution to collect and preserve them was tantamount to a celebration of ignorance. Many of these opponents were, yes, scientists. Maybe they were right.

But for my part, I believe we have forsaken a great opportunity, to recognize the collective creativity of a great American art form, and to consider how it might change.

Thank you all for coming out on this [INSERT WEATHER COMMENT] morning. If you’d like a tour, you can follow me this way.

[TURN AND WALK TOWARD EMPTY LOT]


Photo-illustration images: Getty

Robin Sloan is a fiction writer based in Oakland, California. He is the author of the novels Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough.

===========================

 

www.theatlantic.com /ideas/archive/2020/05/birtherism-and-trump/610978/

Birtherism of a Nation

Adam Serwer
10-13 minutes

Photo-illustration by Chinwe Okona

Perhaps the biggest irony of birtherism is that the guy who created it didn’t mean to.

In 2004, as Barack Obama’s star was rising following his speech at the Democratic National Convention, the columnist Andy Martin declared that Obama was a fraud, that he had “spent a lifetime running from his family heritage and religious heritage.” But Martin insists that, rather than questioning Obama’s birthplace, he was accusing him of embellishing his life story in his memoir, Dreams From My Father.

“I always maintained Obama was born in Hawaii,” Martin complained to a New Hampshire outlet in 2016. “Later, crazies took over the movement and proposed increasingly irrational and unfounded claims [like] Obama was born in Kenya. I never supported those claims in any way."

The matter surfaced in the 2008 Democratic primary, through the preferred medium of conspiracy theorists of the late George W. Bush era, the chain email, circulated by frustrated Hillary Clinton supporters. One such email described by Politico in 2011 read, “Barack Obama’s mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy. She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother then took him to Hawaii to register his birth.” No amount of official government documentation—not even a pair of contemporaneous newspaper announcements—could dispel what was becoming a kind of religious dogma about the nature of Obama’s birth. Other accounts, particularly in conservative media, incorporated Martin’s original observation that Obama’s father was born a Muslim, which meant Obama was secretly a Muslim, which in the logic of conservative media also meant he was secretly a terrorist.

This gives you a vague sense of when birtherism emerged as a conspiracy theory, and of its basic contours: Birtherism is the baseless conjecture that the 44th president of the United States not only was born abroad and was therefore ineligible for the presidency, but also was a secret Muslim planning to undermine America from within. It is the combination of these two elements that transformed birtherism from mere false speculation about Obama’s birth to a statement of values about who belongs in America, and who does not. Conspiracy theories are meant to explain the unexplainable. Birtherism’s explanatory power was negligible, but as a worldview, its appeal to conservatives was enduring. By 2011, about half of Republican voters believed Obama was born abroad.

Bob Bauer: Michael Cohen reminded us why Trump’s birtherism matters

Legal challenges attempted to dislodge Obama from the ballot and the White House, such as from the birther dentist Orly Taitz, but these faltered because neither Obama’s birth certificate nor his birthplace was a mystery. Nevertheless, birtherism, though unable to prevent either his election or his reelection, would prove appealing as an explanation for his politics. In 2010, the conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza wrote in Forbes that Obama’s liberalism was in actuality a form of radical leftism transmitted through his absent father.  

“It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States,” D’Souza wrote. “That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction.” Obama, D’Souza declared, was “a captive of the ideology of a Luo tribesman from the 1950s.”

The article was a faux-scholarly regurgitation of popular theory that had been fermenting in the right-wing fever swamps for some time—Rush Limbaugh told his listeners in June 2009 that Obama was “more African in his roots than he is American.” Other pundits applied D’Souza-style logic to Obama through the prism of his supposed Islamist sympathies: The federal prosecutor turned National Review pundit Andrew C. McCarthy wrote a 2010 book called The Grand Jihad, arguing that the president who had repealed the ban on openly gay service members and endorsed same-sex marriage was part of an international alliance between the American left and political Islam to impose Taliban-style Islamic law on the West.

The Washington Post editorial page promptly gave D’Souza space to summarize his theory. Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, declared that Obama’s actions were “so outside our comprehension” that “only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior can you begin to piece [them] together.” The right-wing pundit Erick Erickson announced, “I’m really beginning to believe all the stories that Obama hates the Brits because of family history. His utter contempt for the U.K. is nuts.”

To mention that America itself exists only because of a colonial rebellion would be to miss the point. The Founders, after all, were white. Obama’s fundamental transgression was not adopting the standard domestic center-left liberalism of Democratic legislators like Ted Kennedy, or the typical hawkish internationalism of Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton. It was defying the order imposed by racial caste in America, just as African rebels overthrowing European colonial regimes had. Simply seeking freedom—or, in Obama’s case, high office—was radicalism. Birtherism could not really explain Obama’s political views, but it could place him, the Democratic Party, and Democratic voters outside the boundaries of American citizenship. The left’s claim to power, in this telling, was as fraudulent as the president’s birth certificate.

The Republican establishment attempted to balance the base’s embrace of birtherism with the pressure they were facing from Democrats to denounce it. At first, Republican leaders like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell said they accepted Obama “at his word,” a non-disavowal that allowed space for the possibility that Obama was lying about his background. But by the 2012 presidential election, even the GOP standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, felt obligated to pay direct tribute to birtherism. “Now I love being home, in this place where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born,” Romney told supporters at a campaign rally in Michigan in August to cheers and laughter. “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate; they know that this is the place that we were born and raised.” The virtue of the joke is that it makes the target responsible for the racism directed against him; if Obama did not want his birthplace questioned, he should have been white.

Romney’s birther joke was preceded by another key development, the alliance between the reality-show celebrity Donald Trump and Fox News. In the spring of 2011, as the Republican primary got under way, Trump embraced the birther theory wholesale, wielding his trademark innuendos and falsehoods. Fox News then picked up the crusade, devoting hours of airtime to his insinuations.

Read: Trump’s implicit defense of Alex Jones is an echo of birtherism

“He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there is something on that birth certificate—maybe religion, maybe it says he’s a Muslim; I don’t know,” Trump told Fox News in late March of that year. “I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding,” he told NBC in early April. “I may tie my tax returns into Obama’s birth certificate,” he suggested later that month. Trump rose sharply in the primary polls, but never formally ran, instead endorsing Romney, who gushed, “It means a great deal to me to have the endorsement of Mr. Trump.”

The episode appeared to conclude with the 45th president successfully forcing the 44th to show his papers. On April 27, the White House released Obama’s “long form” birth certificate. This temporarily embarrassed Trump and led to a dip in the number of Americans questioning Obama’s birthplace. At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that year, Obama mocked Trump as he sat and seethed, red-faced, in the audience.

Fox News, foreshadowing its essential symbiosis with the Trump campaign, and later the Trump presidency, framed the reality-show star’s crusade as a great victory. “It legitimizes his candidacy,” Dick Morris told Bill O’Reilly in April 2011. “It empowers Trump,” O’Reilly agreed.  Here was a glimpse of the future, in which the reality-show star would make some outrageously false claim, and the whole of conservative media would rush to make that falsehood true through rote repetition.

Trump’s dalliance with birtherism did not harm his presidential prospects when the 2016 primary came around, because, unlike most conspiracy theories, birtherism was never meant to answer a factual query. Birtherism is not trying to explain some purportedly mysterious phenomenon, like Tupac Shakur’s unending posthumous releases, the lingering sight of water condensation behind aircraft, or how 19 hijackers evaded detection and managed to execute the most successful terrorist attack in American history. These theories are outlandish, weird, and offensive, but they are all attempts at answering actual questions, even if those questions are stupid. Birtherism was, from the beginning, an answer looking for a question to justify itself.

Birtherism was a statement of values, a way to express allegiance to a particular notion of American identity, one that became the central theme of the Trump campaign itself: To Make America Great Again, to turn back the clock to an era where white political and cultural hegemony was unthreatened by black people, by immigrants, by people of a different faith. By people like Barack Obama. The calls to disavow birtherism missed the point: Trump’s entire campaign was birtherism.

Trump won the Republican primary, and united the party, in part because his run was focused on the psychic wound of the first black presidency. He had, after all, humiliated and humbled Obama. None of the other Republican candidates could make such a claim. None could say, as Trump could, that they had put the first black president in his place. And so none could offer an answer to the anguish that produced birtherism. That very same anguish helped Trump win the presidency.

You could call birtherism a conspiracy theory, sure. But in 2020, looking at the Trump administration’s efforts to diminish the power of minority voters, imprison child migrants, ban Muslim travelers from entering the country, and criminalize his political opposition, it could be more accurately described as the governing ideology of the United States.

Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.

=======================

 

 

www.theatlantic.com /ideas/archive/2020/05/i-was-a-teenage-conspiracist/610975/

I Was a Teenage Conspiracy Theorist

Ellen Cushing
22-28 minutes

Illustrations by Chrissie Abbott

My induction into conspiracy thinking came in the fall of my first year of high school, when my seventh-period journalism teacher devoted a lecture to the Illuminati. A nefarious group of global elites controlled our politics and our economy, he told us. They met in secret and communicated via symbols. Their members included U.S. presidents, CEOs, celebrities. They were everywhere.

He explained all this soberly, in the same way other teachers of mine had explained the International Monetary Fund, or certain laws of mathematics: as unshakable pieces of the universe’s infrastructure that any thinking person had to learn about eventually. I do not recall him using the term theory or otherwise indicating that this was a contested idea, though perhaps I should have been tipped off when he presented as evidence a clip from a then-recent film called The Matrix. At any rate, I was utterly captivated.

This was Berkeley, California, in the anxious time between September 11 and the start of the Iraq War. The world was full of unseen enemies and ulterior motives. Sidewalk graffiti implored anyone who looked at it to DEMAND THE TRUTH ABOUT 9/11 and STOP CHEMTRAILS. The local city council passed a resolution declaring the air overhead a “space-based weapons-free zone.” (This did not affect Pentagon planning, as far as we could tell.) Radio DJs and my friends’ parents would talk vaguely but knowingly about Dick Cheney’s financial interests or the real reasons we were going to war. Long before filter bubbles had a name and a pathology, I lived in one: The government was lying; the elites were consolidating power; the game was rigged; the paranoia was warranted. I knew things were bad, and I knew they were bad in a way that was murky and still emerging. The idea that everything confusing or unfair or suspicious could be the result of an actual conspiracy, and not anything more abstract or complicated, felt appealing to me, and roughly as plausible as any number of extraordinary things I knew to be true. I walked home from school, ate a bowl of Goldfish crackers while watching Oprah, and casually informed my family about the New World Order over dinner.

When I called my parents recently to ask them about my awakening as a child conspiracy theorist, my mother recalled her reaction as something like “bemused tolerance”: “slightly mystified, but nonjudgmental.” It was 2002; parents of teenagers didn’t yet have the vocabulary of worry to be thinking about 4Chan or QAnon or the darker corners of Reddit. That’s because they didn’t exist yet—nor did Facebook, nor Twitter, nor any other fixture of the modern social web. I mostly used the internet to download Blink-182 songs and update my LiveJournal. “I wasn’t freaked out,” my mom told me over the phone. “I just thought, Wow. She’s learning that there are people in the world who believe all types of shit.

It is a parent’s prerogative to overestimate her child. The truth is, at 14, I did not yet really understand that teachers could be wrong, or how to separate good information from bad. What my mom saw as a second-order lesson about the unknowable peculiarity of the human mind, I saw as a much more straightforward one about secret meetings and hidden triangles.

Read: The lasting trauma of Alex Jones’s lies

I was recently relieved to learn that this is all pretty typical, at least from a developmental perspective. “Kids can be very literal,” Valerie Reyna, an adolescent psychologist at Cornell, told me. Anyone who has tried to have a conversation with a 4-year-old knows this to be true of younger children, but the phenomenon extends further into adulthood than many people realize. By our teens, Reyna told me, we can parrot facts—sometimes even complex ones, sometimes even very articulately—but we don’t yet have the insight or the life experience to understand bottom-line meaning.

This is the difference between rote memorization and true comprehension. It’s also the difference between accepting at face value that the Illuminati exists, and understanding that for it to exist, a great many unbelievable things would also have to be true, chiefly that thousands or millions of people would have had to keep a gigantic secret over the course of centuries. “If you have an informed understanding about how the world works, your intuition can guide you,” Reyna said. For this reason, “adults—in general, on average—are more capable of knowing when something is implausible.” Even if my environment hadn’t already made me more open to conspiracy thinking, it seems, the faulty pool filter of my adolescent brain had done me no favors. “It’s not a coincidence,” Reyna said, “that cults try to recruit people when they’re young.”

As it turns out, being a conspiracy theorist is pretty fun. There’s a reason that, though very little substance from my high-school classes has stuck with me over the years, I remember Illuminati day with documentary clarity. It’s the same reason that conspiracism has thrived nearly as long as rationality has, and that, throughout history, people have proved consistently willing to upend their lives over it: Conspiracy thinking is incredibly compelling. It promises an answer to problems as small as expired light bulbs and as big as our radical aloneness in the universe. It is self-sealing in its logic, and self-soothing in its effect: It posits a world where nothing happens by accident, where morality is plain, where every piece of information has divine meaning and every person has agency. It makes a puzzle out of the conspiracy, and a prestige-drama hero out of the conspiracist. “The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms,” the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in his seminal 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” “He is always manning the barricades of civilization.” What Hofstadter declined to put a finger on is the intoxicating feeling of having insider knowledge about the fate of the world, or at least believing you do.

“I think you were really excited to think—and all of us are excited to think—that there’s some secret thing going on beneath the surface,” my mom recalled, that “there’s a truth out there that’s waiting to be discovered. And once you discover it everything makes sense.”

She was right about me, and about us. Conspiracism maps onto some of our most basic brain functions. “Our minds work in particular ways that make us all receptive to conspiracy thinking,” says Rob Brotherton, a psychologist and the author of Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. “When something ambiguous happens in the world, we tend to think, Did somebody want that to happen? This tendency to think about intentions, or to see patterns, or confirmation bias—all of these influence not just the way we think about conspiracy theories, but the way we think about the world every day in a very mundane, very fundamental sense.” It’s tempting, he told me, to think of conspiracy theories as “a psychological aberration, some weird fringe thing, when in fact they’re an offshoot of how our minds work.”

Over the past decade or so, the field of conspiracy psychology has boomed alongside the general public’s interest in conspiracy theories. There’s still a lot we don’t know about how conspiracy thinking takes root in the mind, or why some people seem much more susceptible to it than others. But we know that, as Brotherton noted, just about everyone is susceptible to conspiracy thinking, regardless of age, gender, income, or political ideology. “It's not some weird small group of people in tinfoil hats,” he said. “Or, you know, more pointedly, it's not just the other side: the Republicans if you were a Democrat, or vice versa.”

Beyond that, certain personality traits—paranoia, binarism, dispositional distrust—can tip someone toward conspiracy thinking, as can one’s circumstances, both broad and narrow. “People are drawn to conspiracy theories when they want to satisfy particular psychological needs that are currently unmet,” says Karen Douglas, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent. Douglas mentored Brotherton when he was an undergraduate, and has been studying conspiracy thinking for 12 years, which she estimates is “probably as long as any psychologist has been studying it.” Her research points to three main gaps that conspiracy thinking can fill. One of these is the need for knowledge and certainty—”an epistemic need,” she told me recently over Zoom. “You’re looking for answers. You want to understand what’s going on, and a conspiracy theory can help you get that knowledge and avoid the uncertainty.”

Read: The normalization of conspiracy culture

The second need is existential: the human need to feel safe, secure, and in control. Conspiracy theories are a kind of knowledge, however attenuated, and knowledge is power. When you believe in a conspiracy theory, Douglas said, ”you understand the predicament that you’re in.” In a series of small studies conducted on Northwestern University undergraduates in 2008, Adam Galinsky and Jennifer A. Whitson found that participants who’d been asked to remember a situation where they felt out of control were then more likely to perceive various types of “illusory patterns”—that is, to find coherent, meaningful relationships amid randomness: to see figures within scattered dots, to form correlations between unrelated phenomena, to create superstitions, to believe in conspiracies. A few years later, in 2013, a Polish study of 200 college students found that when they were in a state of high situational anxiety—waiting to take an exam—they were also more likely to agree with conspiratorial statements drawing on racist stereotypes about Jews, Germans, and Arabs.

The third need Douglas identified was social. “If you feel that you have knowledge that other people don't have, then you can feel a sense of superiority over those people,” she said. “It can boost your self-esteem to have this feeling that you're unique compared to other people.” This is why conspiracy theories tend to be organized by the principle of insiders versus outsiders: Conspiracism makes for a convenient way to blame other people for the ills of the world, and offers the added bonus of making the conspiracist feel smart.

When combined, all three of these needs—epistemic, existential, social—make for a perfect storm of conspiracy thinking. They also, incidentally, describe the base condition of adolescence. “Teenagers are particularly vulnerable” to finding patterns where none really exist, Galinsky said, “because there are so many things happening simultaneously—biologically and socially—that make them feel less in control.” They are inundated with stimuli and held captive by hormones. They’re navigating the painful process of transferring influence over their lives from parents to peers. They’re obsessed with social hierarchy, and they are achingly aware, at all times, of how much agency they covet and how little they have.

At 14, I was old enough to see the contours of what adulthood would be like, but I still had to get my parents’ permission to go on field trips, and plink quarters into a pay phone to get a ride home from the movies, which were always PG-13. I felt my feelings intensely and constantly, but I had absolutely no control over them. The University of Miami political scientist Joseph Uscinski is fond of saying that conspiracy theories are for losers—a way for the comparatively powerless to seize something from the comparatively powerful. I was an upper-middle-class white teenager living in a leafy college town; in the context of the universe I was far from disempowered. But I was also a 14-year-old girl. Context didn’t matter; whatever I was feeling at any given moment was big enough to blot out the sun.

(Chrissie Abbott)

I don’t remember how long I earnestly believed in the Illuminati, or exactly why I stopped. No one sat me down, intervention-style, and explained the error of my ways. (If they had, I doubt it would have worked: The Illuminati, like many conspiracies, bakes into its mythology the notion that sinister forces have a vested interest in denying its existence, and skeptics are thus not to be trusted.) But over time, the idea just seemed less and less believable, as did the fact that nobody except this one teacher would know about it. My stint as an Illuminati true believer ended in much the same way my Spice Girls superfandom had years earlier: Slowly, an obsession that had organized my life just slipped away, before I could notice it was leaving me.

But I did not abandon the Illuminati completely once I knew better. Instead, I turned it into a bit. I went East for college and found myself surrounded by people who read Žižek for pleasure and, at 19, already had a favorite soft cheese. I was insecure, homesick, and savagely unhappy; engaging in half-hearted conspiracism was my way of telegraphing how interesting I was to a group of people who were, along all meaningful psychographic vectors, exactly the same as me, but whom I was nonetheless debilitatingly intimidated by. It was a self-conscious performance of my regional identity the same way the Florida kids insisted on wearing shorts year-round, a clumsy attempt at being more entertaining than everyone else if I couldn’t be as smart or as worldly.

By then, we did have Reddit and YouTube and Facebook. The internet had been transformed from a smallish collection of primitive, static, mostly unliked pages to a place you could get lost in. It was easy—downright exciting, even—to spend an hour or two or six staring at a laptop screen, clicking from page to page on the message boards that now existed to serve any subculture or set of ideas you could imagine. I spent hours in rabbit holes about purported inconsistencies in the 9/11 report, or about Avril Lavigne having been replaced by a body double, or about how a race of shape-shifting, lizardlike aliens had wrested control over Earth by taking on humanoid forms.

Read: Going online in the age of conspiracy theories

At this point, conspiracism did not yet carry with it an established body count. These theories felt like harmless entertainment to me, and repeating them a victimless crime. And they comported with the identity I was assembling for myself. As I presided over dorm-room viewings of Loose Change and spouted message-board nonsense at parties, I felt less like I was evangelizing and more like I was telling a ghost story around a campfire, watching everyone’s eyeballs on me at once. Conspiracism was my party trick, my real-life troll, as seductive as it was wrong and in fact even more seductive for its wrongness. It was a proxy for attention: I’d seen for myself how it could command a room, and I loved holding that power in my hand.

I was an idiot, obviously. I was also, apparently, not even particularly original. “Conspiracy theories can have consequences, but a lot of times it’s just a teenager in their bedroom,” Brotherton said. “You know, somebody shitposting on Reddit or 4Chan just for laughs or to get a rise out of somebody.”

“It’s tempting, I think, to simplify and just say, you know, 4 percent of people think the United States is run by lizard people,” he continued. “But really do they? Or is there a percentage of people in there who are just fucking around with the survey, or who are saying this ’cause they think it’s funny or because they think all the people in charge are bad? They’re not necessarily, literally lizards. But you know, I’m going to say that I think this is true in a metaphorical sense. There are a lot of reasons for people entertaining conspiracy theories, not all of them because they literally believe it to be true,” Brotherton said. “One of the ideas is that it could be just signaling something like your broader worldview.”

Birtherism—the lie that Barack Obama wasn’t a natural-born U.S. citizen—was less about the merits of the case than it was about gesturing at the idea that a black man didn’t belong in the White House. The 9/11 Truth movement—for all its detailed discussion of the melting point of industrial steel—is really about conveying a deep distrust of the government. The insistence that mass shootings are false-flag operations fabricated by crisis actors is a twisted form of commentary about gun rights and media bias. This is why it doesn’t matter that so many of these theories, the existence of the Illuminati among them, fall apart under even the feeblest scrutiny: The worldview dictates the details, not the other way around.

By the later part of my teens, the Illuminati was a stand-in for something I understood to be true about the distribution of power and wealth in the world. I no longer believed in it literally, but I believed in—still believe in—the metaphor: rich and influential people secretly working together to enact unseen influence over the rest of us. I genuinely regret the moments when I repeated things I knew not to be true, but I don’t regret becoming obsessed with something that unlocked a deeper sort of thinking about systemic inequity. Why would I? I was right! It would be naive to suggest that the power always acts in transparency, generosity, and good faith. Sometimes, even demonstrably false conspiracy theories contain a little bit of truth. Other times, what seems like an absurd fabrication turns out to be real.

“There are real, even seemingly outlandish, shady, prototypically crazy-sounding conspiracy theories,” Brotherton said. “There are real historical precedents for that.” In the same high school where I learned about the Illuminati, I also learned about Watergate, MK-Ultra, Iran-Contra, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. I wrote my senior thesis about COINTELPRO, a wide-ranging government surveillance effort that would sound like pure paranoia had the FBI itself not admitted to it after the fact. About 75 miles north of my parents’ house sits Bohemian Grove, where the global elite gather in secret every July, and where friends of friends reported finding summer work as NDA-bound cater waiters. So many contemporary political phenomena—dark money, gerrymandering, government ignorance, government malevolence—that once seemed like shadowy plots are now just established fact.

“If we could just prevent everybody from believing any conspiracy theory, we would be losing something important,” Brotherton said. To want to interrogate power, make sense of suffering, root out sources of exploitation and deception: None of these are fundamentally bad impulses. They’re understandable, in the context of an opaque and often unresponsive government, a world-historic consolidation of wealth and influence, and a broken informational environment. Though their relationship to the truth is very different, conspiracism and critical thinking are two points on the same spectrum.

One of my favorite thinkers on this point is Uscinski, the political scientist who developed the idea that conspiracy theories are for losers. “Conspiracy theorists can be likened to lots of things—gadflies, watchdogs, tripwires,” he writes in a 2017 paper. “But they are most similar to defense lawyers. They are opposing counsel in the war of political ideas, where the establishment is the prosecution.” At their worst, conspiracy theories advance paranoia, racism, violence, and a distinctly cynical and individualistic worldview. But at their best, they are a reminder to both those with power and those without it that someone is watching. They’re a nudge toward more transparency, more communication, more equity. They’re an overly sensitive smoke detector: Noisy and not often right, but when they are, we are grateful something was making such a racket.

On a recent Sunday, I called up my friend Jake, who sat a few feet away from me in that ninth-grade journalism class. I wanted to mend the holes of my memory, but I also wanted to know what he thought about the larger questions on my mind. In the 15 years since high school, the stakes of conspiracy thinking had increased considerably. People had died. Families had been ripped apart. Great institutions had come under threat. A conspiracy theorist had killed 77 people on a summer day in Norway in order to draw attention to a purported globalist-Arab plot to Islamize Europe. Another had carried a rifle into a family pizza joint. Yet another had been arrested after taunting the parents of murdered schoolchildren. I wanted to know if Jake was mad that we’d learned about the Illuminati in school, and whether I should be madder. Was this whole episode just another artifact of quirky Berkeley—dumb but fundamentally harmless, like shorts in November—or did it represent something more sinister, something more like the poisoning of young minds at the hands of an authority figure?

It wasn’t sinister, he didn’t think. Nor was it exactly harmless. Jake’s a lawyer now, but before that he was a high-school teacher, in a chaotic urban public school not dissimilar from the one we attended. “What puzzles me,” he said, “is that when I was a teacher, I was desperate for more time to go over the material with my students. Looking back, I can’t believe we wasted even one class talking about that stuff.”

It’s tempting, and common, to see conspiracism as an information problem, a thinking problem, an affliction for people who simply don’t know any better. But if that were the case, we would have eradicated it a long time ago. Also, devoted conspiracism requires a great deal of brainpower: Collecting and narrativizing evidence, however incorrectly, is “a complex integration of data that is cognitively effortful,” as Whitson and Galinsky’s paper puts it. Also, I knew better.

The tragedy of conspiracism isn’t that it is the absence of thinking, but the misapplication of it. It’s a squandered lesson, and we all only have so much time in the classroom. I’m glad I began to think critically about power and wealth at a relatively young age, but I sure wish I’d taken a less circuitous route there. When I think of my misspent youth as a conspiracist, it’s the spending part that gets me: all those minutes being taught about the Illuminati when I could have been being taught about journalism, all those hours talking about jet fuel and steel beams when I could have been learning about something equally as interesting but real. All those people all around the world, connecting dots and searching for patterns where none exists. All the noise, all the never-ending rabbit holes, all the misdirected interrogation. All that wasted imagination.

In 1971, the economist and computer scientist Herbert Simon published a paper on the subject of “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.” It was a prescient piece of writing, and not only because our world has gotten unimaginably information-richer in the half century since he produced it. Simon’s work long predated the internet message board and the endless Twitter thread, but it identified a phenomenon that will feel familiar to anyone who has spent time looking for answers in either. “The wealth of information,” Simon wrote, “means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.” Information, he wrote, “consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” Attention is the great scarce resource of our intellectual economy, and the most important thing any of us have to give away. And conspiracy, as I learned young, is an attention monster.

Ellen Cushing is Special Projects Editor at The Atlantic.

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www.theatlantic.com /culture/archive/2020/05/survivor-20-years-later-keeps-teaching-us-trust-no-one/610981/

The Paranoid Style in American Entertainment

Megan Garber
18-22 minutes

Photo-illustration by Max-o-matic

Last summer, BuzzFeed published an article detailing some of the betrayals that can occur when reality is reimagined as a genre of entertainment. Sourced from people who claimed to have inside knowledge of the workings of reality-TV shows, the piece included such resonant bummers as “Lifelines for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire can totally google the questions” and “Reactions on What Not to Wear aren’t genuine” and “Some couples on Divorce Court aren’t actually married.” The story joined years’ worth of similar articles (“Real or Fake? The Truth About Some of Your Favorite Reality TV Shows”; “Reality TV Hoaxes You Fell For”); that reality lacks realness was not at all, by mid-2019, a new revelation. BuzzFeed’s indictment was notable, however, for one of the headlines it ran under: “17 Secrets About Reality TV Shows That’ll Make You Question Everything.”

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The hyperbole highlighted a truth. Reality TV really does encourage viewers to question everything—in part because it nullifies the distinction between fiction and fact. The genre involves real people, playing themselves on TV. It claims to be unscripted; in practice, it is thoroughly plotted and highly produced. It winks. But it also assumes that you, the audience, will wink back. Is The Bachelor real or fake? The answer is yes. How real are the Real Housewives? Real enough. The membranes are porous. Many Bachelor stars, allegedly looking for love, parlay the exposure the show gives them into gigs as Instagram influencers and professional “personalities.” Housewives alchemize their fame into $100 million cocktail brands. Viewers, for the most part, are privy to those transactions. They understand that reality, a postmodern genre in a post-truth culture, turns the logic of fictional entertainment on its head: It demands a willing suspension of belief.

The historian Richard Hofstadter titled his 1965 essay collection, an analysis of the cultural elements that convert suspicion into a way of life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. The real subject of the book, however, is the American psyche—what mistrust, as an individual impulse, can look like at scale. Reality shows, ubiquitous in American culture not only on TV itself but also on Facebook and grocery-store magazine stands, quietly rationalize the kind of paranoia Hofstadter identified: They involve producers, unseen but omnipresent, who shape the course of human events. They suggest that suspicion might be the most rational option. The 2018 Reader’s Digest post “13 Secrets Reality TV Producers Won’t Tell You” is written in notably conspiratorial tones—and from the perspective of those producers. “We’re masters of manipulation,” the article announces. “We love getting into contestants’ heads on camera” (because via the “confessional” interviews so common on reality shows, “you can nudge a cast member to think a certain way”). Here’s one more “secret” revealed by those anonymous authors of reality: “We’re all-powerful.”  

Late in the first season of Survivor, the 2000 CBS show whose smash success set the template for reality TV as a genre, Kelly Wiglesworth, a river guide from Las Vegas, wins one of the show’s challenges. Her reward for the victory is first to be whisked away from the camp that she and her fellow contestants have built on a beach near Borneo. But that’s not all: She gets to spend her reprieve with Survivor’s host, Jeff Probst, drinking beer—Bud Light, Probst mentions aloud—and watching … the premiere of Survivor. The scene that results, set in a “bar” that has been constructed for the stunt, is both an artifact of the early days of reality TV and a harbinger of the cheerful self-referentiality that American pop culture would adopt in the early 21st century: There was Wiglesworth, situated beneath a neon sign that read SURVIVOR BAR, laughing with recognition as she saw herself being stranded (“stranded”) with her fellow castaways (“castaways”) in the South China Sea. There she was, sipping her product-placed beer, watching herself being watched.

Survivor is now 20 years old; the pilot episode that Wiglesworth viewed with Probst aired in May of 2000. The show, currently airing its 40th(!) season, stays true, still, to the structure it debuted after Mark Burnett pitched it as an Americanized version of the Swedish show Expedition: Robinson—reality TV as a war of attrition. The contestants’ ultimate goal, Probst often told viewers that first season, with no apparent abashment, was to outlive the 15 other voluntary castaways to become the show’s “sole survivor.” To accomplish that—and, thus, to win the show’s prizes ($1 million and, for good measure, a Pontiac Aztek)—the players would be required to subject themselves to an array of manufactured hardships. And they would need to accommodate themselves to the demands outlined in the show’s motto: “Outwit. Outplay. Outlast.”

The game show had epic overtones. Each episode of Survivor’s pilot season made a point of reiterating the great danger the contestants had put themselves in as they battled for survival. (As evidence of the threat, the show offers a lot of B-roll of snakes—some of them striking out, menacingly, in the direction of the camera.) Each episode, as well, professes a great interest in ethics. Tribal Council, the recurring meeting during which contestants vote one another off the show, is also the time when, as Probst repeatedly intones, you “account for your actions” on the island. He adds, at one point: “What happens here is sacred.”

Read: “The Image” in the age of pseudo-reality

Against that backdrop of moral reckoning, though, there is also “tree mail,” the quirky mechanism through which the show’s producers communicate with contestants, informing them of the challenges they will be required to participate in to win immunity or other rewards. (The messages, for reasons left unexplained by a show that is set in the 21st century, are often written in old-timey script—and in rhyming couplets.) There are also “immunity idols”: the statues whose possession confers protection from elimination. There is the fact that Tribal Council often takes place on sets whose decor (rickety rope bridges, torches, fire pits that double as amphitheaters) is less evocative of Lord of the Flies than of Legends of the Hidden Temple. Before casting their votes for who should be banished from the island, contestants discuss the events of the past several days while gathered around the pit in the manner of sitcom characters at a dinner table: arranged in a neat semicircle so that each face is exposed to the camera. In the foreground of the Tribal Council scene, over several episodes in the first season, sits a treasure chest whose wide maw is open to reveal stacks of play money.

That campy aesthetic is telling: The concept of the show as a high-minded, man-versus-man-versus-nature saga is attenuated by the knowingly manufactured elements of the game. Survivor’s producers are its minor gods. Why did that first episode feature 16 contestants? Why were those contestants divided into two tribes? Why were they required to complete the particular challenges presented to them? Because offstage power brokers—Burnett and his fellow producers—made those decisions on their behalf. Those agents are rarely acknowledged on the show, but their desires and demands are total. The contestants and, consequently, the viewers navigate the world they’ve constructed.

Unseen forces bending the arc of human lives: This is also, as it happens, a foundational assumption of any conspiracy theory. (One of Survivor’s fellow long-running reality shows is named Big Brother; the title is a revealing joke.) One of Hofstadter’s arguments in The Paranoid Style is that the conspiracy-minded tend to see history itself as the outcome of malicious powers—secretive, collective, nebulous—wantonly executing their will. All the world as Oz, with invisible wizards pulling the strings; this idea is cheerfully validated every Wednesday at 8 p.m. (7 p.m. Central). Joseph Uscinski, a political-science professor at the University of Miami and a co-author of the book American Conspiracy Theories, notes how readily the internal logic of shows like Survivor can echo the power dynamics of conspiracist thought. Contestants might say, “It’s beyond our control,” he told me recently of the experiences those shows create. As for the relationship those contestants have with the shows’ producers: “We’re at their whim.”

In some ways, that also describes the transactions of fiction: Authors create, and audiences are willful captives of the creation. But the terms of fiction, which have been negotiated over centuries, are widely established and commonly understood. They have a luxury that an extremely young genre does not. Survivor’s first episode aired two years after the release of The Truman Show, a film that neatly illustrates the anxieties that would attend the age of reality TV. Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) is an orphan adopted by a studio as a newborn so that his life could be aired as a television show. As an unwitting—and, thus, unwilling—reality star, Truman is also the embodiment of an idea that might be paranoid were it not, in his case, true: The whole world is conspiring to dupe him. Truman’s mother and father and wife and best friend are actors who pretend to love him. His blandly idyllic home, his profession, his marriage—the very weather he moves in—are guided by distant producers who utter directives like “Cue the sun.”

The movie, whose plot is propelled by Truman’s slow realization that his life has been one of surveillance, is a satire informed by several other genres (“Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi,” one review classified it). Often, though, the film reads most readily as horror. Truman is trapped, utterly. He is controlled, thoroughly. TV viewers—reminders of how possible it is to be obsessed with celebrities without fully caring about them—are the monsters that pursue him. But the real villain of the film is The Truman Show’s “designer and architect,” Christof (Ed Harris), who controls cameras with the verve of a maestro and who justifies his manipulations by telling a journalist, “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.”

Read: “The Masked Singer” lets you in on the scam

This is the paranoid style, reimagined as fiction. And it extends into the nascent phenomenon that The Truman Show is satirizing. “I can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake,” a contestant on the current season of Survivor, frustrated by the show’s latest round of machinations, whispers to a fellow competitor. Another contestant patiently explains his strategy to the cameras: “What I have to do is pretend that I’m on a side that I’m really not ... I’m undercover so I can keep infiltrated in the group that I really want out.”

Double-dealing. Mutualized suspicion. Paranoia that is serially justified. Survivor, over its two-decade run, has concocted many methods of complicating its premise, including bringing back fan favorites and villains and finding new ways to pit tribes against one another. (Remember Brawn vs. Brains vs. Beauty?) Survivor recently introduced a new way for contestants to “outwit” one another; it dubbed this mechanism the “Extortion Advantage.” The game has gotten rougher, the production values sleeker; but the ideas that animated the first season have remained. Survivor, through it all, has treated its own project as a slow and sweeping metaphor—for Darwinism, for capitalism, for America, for life itself.

Before the final vote that first season—before several contestants who had been voted off the island were asked to choose whether Richard Hatch, the communications strategist who was presented as an avatar of American corporatism, or Wiglesworth, the yoga-posing nature guide, would win the show’s prizes—Probst delivered a speech. Over the previous 39 days, he told the contestants, “you’ve created a new civilization and you lived within it, and you all played the game very well—a game that definitely parallels our own regular lives in ways that we probably never imagined.” This was an echo of how Burnett, who counts Lord of the Flies as a favorite book, had sold the show: as an exploration, one report summed up, of “how real people relate to each other under pressure”—one “that might even say something profound about the human condition.”

That “real people” premise, though, gets stretched when you notice that, on the buffs the contestants wear to signal their tribal affiliation, the Survivor logo is printed next to another one: Reebok. The premise gets stretched thinner still when, for one of the challenges, Probst distributes handheld camcorders to contestants and sends them into the jungle to film what he calls The Survivor Witch Project. (The Blair Witch Project, a film that had its own fun putting scare quotes around reality, had premiered in 1999.) The premise gets stretched thinner still when, from under the stained pants and tattered tank tops that present Survivor as a sober study of communal abjection, mic packs peek out. In 2001, just after Survivor had become a hit, ABC News ran an article that anticipated BuzzFeed’s “17 Secrets About Reality TV Shows That’ll Make You Question Everything.” Headlined “Some Survivor Scenes Were Reenactments,” the piece reports that Burnett “admitted this week he sometimes reenacts scenes of his hit CBS show to get a more picturesque shot.” The story notes Burnett’s insistence that the reenactments served merely aesthetic purposes—and that the contestants’ behavior itself was spontaneous. It adds: “But he said he sees no reason why ‘reality’ should stand in the way of production values.”

Read: The spectacular P. T. Barnum

Peter Knight, the author of the 2000 book Conspiracy Culture: From the Kennedy Assassination to The X-Files, studies the intersection of conspiracy theory and American popular culture. And many TV shows, he told me, “are basically ways for American society to stage political philosophy debates that it might find hard to do in other ways.” Neoliberalism versus collectivism, dog-eat-dog politics versus acting for the good of the pack—Survivor, Knight noted, is a loaded show that comes down to a loaded question: “Does altruism get you the prize or does paranoia get you the prize?”

That tension helps explain Survivor’s Machiavellian tilt—and its decades-long appeal. One of P. T. Barnum’s insights into the success of his various hoaxes was that people, on some deep level, love being fooled. They enjoy it so much, in fact, that they will happily pay for the privilege of being lied to—because the lie itself becomes a puzzle to be solved. Survivor, a show created by a man who operates in the Barnumian tradition, leverages a similar recognition. The allure of reality TV is not merely voyeurism, but also the cathartic thrill of suspicion. As Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead argue in their 2019 book, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy, disorientation—the cognitive chaos of “conspiracy without the theory”—is an element of the latest form of American conspiracism. So is knowingness: the electric rush of feeling savvy to the workings of the world in a way most people are not.

The shows that Survivor helped inspire typically argue the same. Every contestant on The Bachelor who whispers that her competition isn’t “there for the right reasons,” every person who is edited to be a hero or a villain, every real-estate agent who flips a house, every diva who flips a table—each dares viewers to consider what’s real, what’s fake, and what’s the difference. So do the tabloids, the places where the casts of the shows go to tell their “true stories” in more detail. So do satires like UnREAL—a darkly fictionalized treatment of the behind-the-scenes workings of a Bachelor-like dating show. For the audience, part of the satisfaction of it all is in the sleuthing: fan fiction, in reverse. The X-Files, its premise inspired by extremely nonfictional failures of the American government, employed this imperative as one of its taglines: “Trust no one.” This, however, was another of the show’s mottos: “The truth is out there.”

Viewers, in general, know they are being duped. But once you see the duplicity, it becomes easy to notice its outlines everywhere: in other entertainments, in the news media, in world events. Who are the producers editing the news programs that, in turn, edit the world? Who are the producers working behind the scenes of the American university, or of American government, or of American history? Who has power? Who should? The CBS executive to whom Mark Burnett pitched Survivor was Leslie Moonves, who—though he denied the allegations—would later resign from the network after a series of sexual-assault claims against him were brought to light. Burnett would tweak the premises of his smash hit to create The Apprentice, the series that laundered Donald Trump’s reputation so efficiently that it helped him win the American presidency. Producers of The Apprentice have given interviews detailing the ways they edited their footage of Trump to make him seem more coherent, more intelligent, more authoritative. The conceit of their show would make sense only with a successful mogul as its star. So the producers created one. “Most of us knew he was a fake,” one of them said in 2018. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.”

The rest of us are living with the consequences. Trump, elevated by television, treats his presidency as an outgrowth of the medium. He preens through his duties as if he were still on a set, his face soft-lit, his mistakes studiously back-edited. But those performances, of course, are all too real. The people on the other end of them—many fearing what might become of their lives with each new season of Trump’s America—have little recourse but to watch as the show goes on. Casts and viewers, plots and twists—what is the rational reading of this irrational moment in human history? What is the conspiratorial one? The show itself will not answer. The star will do what he does. But the producers might whisper, from behind the scenes, what so many of them know to be true: With enough footage, you can turn anything into reality.

Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers culture.

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www.theatlantic.com /magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/

The Prophecies of Q

Adrienne LaFrance
53-67 minutes

If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street. You could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings. You know that they are powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Donald Trump stands between you and a damned and ravaged world. You see plague and pestilence sweeping the planet, and understand that they are part of the plan. You know that a clash between good and evil cannot be avoided, and you yearn for the Great Awakening that is coming. And so you must be on guard at all times. You must shield your ears from the scorn of the ignorant. You must find those who are like you. And you must be prepared to fight.

You know all this because you believe in Q.

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I. GENESIS

The origins of QAnon are recent, but even so, separating myth from reality can be hard. One place to begin is with Edgar Maddison Welch, a deeply religious father of two, who until Sunday, December 4, 2016, had lived an unremarkable life in the small town of Salisbury, North Carolina. That morning, Welch grabbed his cellphone, a box of shotgun shells, and three loaded guns—a 9-mm AR-15 rifle, a six-shot .38‑caliber Colt revolver, and a shotgun—and hopped into his Toyota Prius. He drove 360 miles to a well-to-do neighborhood in Northwest Washington, D.C.; parked his car; put the revolver in a holster at his hip; held the AR-15 rifle across his chest; and walked through the front door of a pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong.

Comet happens to be the place where, on a Sunday afternoon two years earlier, my then-baby daughter tried her first-ever sip of water. Kids gather there with their parents and teammates after soccer games on Saturdays, and local bands perform on the weekends. In the back, children challenge their grandparents to Ping-Pong matches as they wait for their pizzas to come out of the big clay oven in the middle of the restaurant. Comet Ping Pong is a beloved spot in Washington.

That day, people noticed Welch right away. An AR-15 rifle makes for a conspicuous sash in most social settings, but especially at a place like Comet. As parents, children, and employees rushed outside, many still chewing, Welch began to move through the restaurant, at one point attempting to use a butter knife to pry open a locked door, before giving up and firing several rounds from his rifle into the lock. Behind the door was a small computer-storage closet. This was not what he was expecting.

Welch had traveled to Washington because of a conspiracy theory known, now famously, as Pizzagate, which claimed that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong. The idea originated in October 2016, when WikiLeaks made public a trove of emails stolen from the account of John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff and then the chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign; Comet was mentioned repeatedly in exchanges Podesta had with the restaurant’s owner, James Alefantis, and others. The emails were mainly about fundraising events, but high-profile pro–Donald Trump figures such as Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones began advancing the claim—which originated in trollish corners of the internet (such as 4chan) and then spread to more accessible precincts (Twitter, YouTube)—that the emails were proof of ritualistic child abuse. Some conspiracy theorists asserted that it was taking place in the basement at Comet, where there is no basement. References in the emails to “pizza” and “pasta” were interpreted as code words for “girls” and “little boys.”

Shortly after Trump’s election, as Pizzagate roared across the internet, Welch started binge-watching conspiracy-theory videos on YouTube. He tried to recruit help from at least two people to carry out a vigilante raid, texting them about his desire to sacrifice “the lives of a few for the lives of many” and to fight “a corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own backyard.” When Welch finally found himself inside the restaurant and understood that Comet Ping Pong was just a pizza shop, he set down his firearms, walked out the door, and surrendered to police, who had by then secured the perimeter. “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” Welch told The New York Times after his arrest.

Welch seems to have sincerely believed that children were being held at Comet Ping Pong. His family and friends wrote letters to the judge on his behalf, describing him as a dedicated father, a devout Christian, and a man who went out of his way to care for others. Welch had trained as a volunteer firefighter. He had gone on an earthquake-response mission to Haiti with the local Baptist Men’s Association. A friend from his church wrote, “He exhibits the actions of a person who strives to learn biblical truth and apply it.” Welch himself expressed what seemed like genuine remorse, saying in a handwritten note submitted to the judge by his lawyers: “It was never my intention to harm or frighten innocent lives, but I realize now just how foolish and reckless my decision was.” He was sentenced to four years in prison.

Pizzagate seemed to fade. Some of its most visible proponents, such as Jack Posobiec, a conspiracy theorist who is now a correspondent for the pro-Trump cable-news channel One America News Network, backed away. Facing the specter of legal action by Alefantis, Alex Jones, who runs the conspiracy-theory website Infowars and hosts an affiliated radio show, apologized for promoting Pizzagate.

Read: The lasting trauma of Alex Jones’s lies

While Welch may have expressed regret, he gave no indication that he had stopped believing the underlying Pizzagate message: that a cabal of powerful elites was abusing children and getting away with it. Judging from a surge of activity on the internet, many others had found ways to move beyond the Comet Ping Pong episode and remain focused on what they saw as the larger truth. If you paid attention to the right voices on the right websites, you could see in real time how the core premises of Pizzagate were being recycled, revised, and reinterpreted. The millions of people paying attention to sites like 4chan and Reddit could continue to learn about that secretive and untouchable cabal; about its malign actions and intentions; about its ties to the left wing and specifically to Democrats and especially to Clinton; about its bloodlust and its moral degeneracy. You could also—and this would prove essential—read about a small but swelling band of underground American patriots fighting back.

All of this, taken together, defined a worldview that would soon have a name: QAnon, derived from a mysterious figure, “Q,” posting anonymously on 4chan. QAnon does not possess a physical location, but it has an infrastructure, a literature, a growing body of adherents, and a great deal of merchandising. It also displays other key qualities that Pizzagate lacked. In the face of inconvenient facts, it has the ambiguity and adaptability to sustain a movement of this kind over time. For QAnon, every contradiction can be explained away; no form of argument can prevail against it.

Conspiracy theories are a constant in American history, and it is tempting to dismiss them as inconsequential. But as the 21st century has progressed, such a dismissal has begun to require willful blindness. I was a city-hall reporter for a local investigative-news site called Honolulu Civil Beat in 2011 when Donald Trump was laying the groundwork for a presidential run by publicly questioning whether Barack Obama had been born in Hawaii, as all facts and documents showed. Trump maintained that Obama had really been born in Africa, and therefore wasn’t a natural-born American—making him ineligible for the highest office. I remember the debate in our Honolulu newsroom: Should we even cover this “birther” madness? As it turned out, the allegations, based entirely on lies, captivated enough people to give Trump a launching pad.

Nine years later, as reports of a fearsome new virus suddenly emerged, and with Trump now president, a series of ideas began burbling in the QAnon community: that the coronavirus might not be real; that if it was, it had been created by the “deep state,” the star chamber of government officials and other elite figures who secretly run the world; that the hysteria surrounding the pandemic was part of a plot to hurt Trump’s reelection chances; and that media elites were cheering the death toll. Some of these ideas would make their way onto Fox News and into the president’s public utterances. As of late last year, according to The New York Times, Trump had retweeted accounts often focused on conspiracy theories, including those of QAnon, on at least 145 occasions.

Read: The coronavirus conspiracy boom

The power of the internet was understood early on, but the full nature of that power—its ability to shatter any semblance of shared reality, undermining civil society and democratic governance in the process—was not. The internet also enabled unknown individuals to reach masses of people, at a scale Marshall McLuhan never dreamed of. The warping of shared reality leads a man with an AR-15 rifle to invade a pizza shop. It brings online forums into being where people colorfully imagine the assassination of a former secretary of state. It offers the promise of a Great Awakening, in which the elites will be routed and the truth will be revealed. It causes chat sites to come alive with commentary speculating that the coronavirus pandemic may be the moment QAnon has been waiting for. None of this could have been imagined as recently as the turn of the century.

QAnon is emblematic of modern America’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and its enthusiasm for them. But it is also already much more than a loose collection of conspiracy-minded chat-room inhabitants. It is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. And we are likely closer to the beginning of its story than the end. The group harnesses paranoia to fervent hope and a deep sense of belonging. The way it breathes life into an ancient preoccupation with end-times is also radically new. To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion.

Many people were reluctant to speak with me about QAnon as I reported this story. The movement’s adherents have sometimes proved willing to take matters into their own hands. Last year, the FBI classified QAnon as a domestic-terror threat in an internal memo. The memo took note of a California man arrested in 2018 with bomb-making materials. According to the FBI, he had planned to attack the Illinois capitol to “make Americans aware of ‘Pizzagate’ and the New World Order (NWO) who were dismantling society.” The memo also took note of a QAnon follower in Nevada who was arrested in 2018 after blocking traffic on the Hoover Dam in an armored truck. The man, heavily armed, was demanding the release of the inspector general’s report on Hillary Clinton’s emails. The FBI memo warned that conspiracy theories stoke the threat of extremist violence, especially when individuals “claiming to act as ‘researchers’ or ‘investigators’ single out people, businesses, or groups which they falsely accuse of being involved in the imagined scheme.”

Read: Instagram is full of conspiracy theories and extremism

QAnon adherents are feared for ferociously attacking skeptics online and for inciting physical violence. On a now-defunct Reddit board dedicated to QAnon, commenters took delight in describing Clinton’s potential fate. One person wrote: “I’m surprised no one has assassinated her yet honestly.” Another: “The buzzards rip her rotting corpse to shreds.” A third: “I want to see her blood pouring down the gutters!”

Illustration: Arsh Raziuddin; animation: Vishakha Darbha

When I spoke with Clinton recently about QAnon, she said, “I just get under their skin unlike anybody else … If I didn’t have Secret Service protection going through my mail, finding weird stuff, tracking the threats against me—which are still very high—I would be worried.” She has come to realize that the invented reality in which conspiracy theorists place her is not some bizarre parallel universe but actually one that shapes our own. Referring to internet trolling operations, Clinton said, “I don’t think until relatively recently most people understood how well organized they were, and how many different components of their strategy they have put in place.”

II. REVELATION

On October 28, 2017, the anonymous user now widely referred to as “Q” appeared for the first time on 4chan, a so-called image board that is known for its grotesque memes, sickening photographs, and brutal teardown culture. Q predicted the imminent arrest of Hillary Clinton and a violent uprising nationwide, posting this:

HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run. Passport approved to be flagged effective 10/30 @ 12:01am. Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur. US M’s will conduct the operation while NG activated. Proof check: Locate a NG member and ask if activated for duty 10/30 across most major cities.

And then this:

Mockingbird HRC detained, not arrested (yet). Where is Huma? Follow Huma. This has nothing to do w/ Russia (yet). Why does Potus surround himself w/ generals? What is military intelligence? Why go around the 3 letter agencies? What Supreme Court case allows for the use of MI v Congressional assembled and approved agencies? Who has ultimate authority over our branches of military w/o approval conditions unless 90+ in wartime conditions? What is the military code? Where is AW being held? Why? POTUS will not go on tv to address nation. POTUS must isolate himself to prevent negative optics. POTUS knew removing criminal rogue elements as a first step was essential to free and pass legislation. Who has access to everything classified? Do you believe HRC, Soros, Obama etc have more power than Trump? Fantasy. Whoever controls the office of the Presidency controls this great land. They never believed for a moment they (Democrats and Republicans) would lose control. This is not a R v D battle. Why did Soros donate all his money recently? Why would he place all his funds in a RC? Mockingbird 10.30.17 God bless fellow Patriots.

Clinton was not arrested on October 30, but that didn’t deter Q, who continued posting ominous predictions and cryptic riddles—with prompts like “Find the reflection inside the castle”—often written in the form of tantalizing fragments and rhetorical questions. Q made it clear that he wanted people to believe he was an intelligence officer or military official with Q clearance, a level of access to classified information that includes nuclear-weapons design and other highly sensitive material. (I’m using he because many Q followers do, though Q remains anonymous—hence “QAnon.”) Q’s tone is conspiratorial to the point of cliché: “I’ve said too much,” and “Follow the money,” and “Some things must remain classified to the very end.”

What might have languished as a lonely screed on a single image board instead incited fervor. Its profile was enhanced, according to Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins of NBC News, by several conspiracy theorists whose promotion of Q in turn helped build up their own online profiles. By now, nearly three years since Q’s original messages appeared, there have been thousands of what his followers call “Q drops”—messages posted to image boards by Q. He uses a password-protected “tripcode,” a series of letters and numbers visible to other image-board users to signal the continuity of his identity over time. (Q’s tripcode has changed on occasion, prompting flurries of speculation.) As Q has moved from one image board to the next—from 4chan to 8chan to 8kun, seeking a safe harbor—QAnon adherents have only become more devoted. If the internet is one big rabbit hole containing infinitely recursive rabbit holes, QAnon has somehow found its way down all of them, gulping up lesser conspiracy theories as it goes.

From the September 2017 issue: How America lost its mind

In its broadest contours, the QAnon belief system looks something like this: Q is an intelligence or military insider with proof that corrupt world leaders are secretly torturing children all over the world; the malefactors are embedded in the deep state; Donald Trump is working tirelessly to thwart them. (“These people need to ALL be ELIMINATED,” Q wrote in one post.) The eventual destruction of the global cabal is imminent, Q prophesies, but can be accomplished only with the support of patriots who search for meaning in Q’s clues. To believe Q requires rejecting mainstream institutions, ignoring government officials, battling apostates, and despising the press. One of Q’s favorite rallying cries is “You are the news now.” Another is “Enjoy the show,” a phrase that his disciples regard as a reference to a coming apocalypse: When the world as we know it comes to an end, everyone’s a spectator.

People who have taken Q to heart like to say they’ve been paying attention from the very beginning, the way someone might brag about having listened to Radiohead before The Bends. A promise of foreknowledge is part of Q’s appeal, as is the feeling of being part of a secret community, which is reinforced through the use of acronyms and ritual phrases such as “Nothing can stop what is coming” and “Trust the plan.”

One phrase that serves as a special touchstone among QAnon adherents is “the calm before the storm.” Q first used it a few days after his initial post, and it arrived with a specific history. On the evening of October 5, 2017—not long before Q first made himself known on 4chan—President Trump stood beside the first lady in a loose semicircle with 20 or so senior military leaders and their spouses for a photo in the State Dining Room at the White House. Reporters had been invited to watch as Trump’s guests posed and smiled. Trump couldn’t seem to stop talking. “You guys know what this represents?” he asked at one point, tracing an incomplete circle in the air with his right index finger. “Tell us, sir,” one onlooker replied. The president’s response was self-satisfied, bordering on a drawl: “Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.”

“What’s the storm?” one of the journalists asked.

“Could be the calm—the calm before the storm,” Trump said again. His repetition seemed to be for dramatic effect. The whir of camera shutters grew louder.

The reporters became insistent: “What storm, Mr. President?”

A curt response from Trump: “You’ll find out.”

Those 37 seconds of presidential ambiguity made headlines right away—relations with Iran had been tense in recent days—but they would also become foundational lore for eventual followers of Q. The president’s circular hand gesture is of particular interest to them. You may think he was motioning to the semicircle gathered around him, they say, but he was really drawing the letter Q in the air. Was Trump playing the role of John the Baptist, proclaiming what was to come? Was he himself the anointed one?

Read: Covfefe and the real meaning of a Trump typo turned meme

It’s impossible to know the number of QAnon adherents with any precision, but the ranks are growing. At least 35 current or former congressional candidates have embraced Q, according to an online tally by the progressive nonprofit Media Matters for America. Those candidates have either directly praised QAnon in public or approvingly referenced QAnon slogans. (One Republican candidate for Congress, Matthew Lusk of Florida, includes QAnon under the “issues” section of his campaign website, posing the question: “Who is Q?”) QAnon has by now made its way onto every major social and commercial platform and any number of fringe sites. Tracy Diaz, a QAnon evangelist, known online by the name TracyBeanz, has 185,000 followers on Twitter and more than 100,000 YouTube subscribers. She helped lift QAnon from obscurity, facilitating its transition to mainstream social media. (A publicist described Diaz as “really private” and declined requests for an interview.) On TikTok, videos with the hashtag #QAnon have garnered millions of views. There are too many QAnon Facebook groups, plenty of them ghost towns, to do a proper count, but the most active ones publish thousands of items each day. (In 2018, Reddit banned QAnon groups from its platform for inciting violence.)

Adherents are ever looking out for signs from on high, plumbing for portents when guidance from Q himself is absent. The coronavirus, for instance—what does it signify? In several of the big Facebook groups, people erupted in a frenzy of speculation, circulating a theory that Trump’s decision to wear a yellow tie to a White House briefing about the virus was a sign that the outbreak wasn’t real: “He is telling us there is no virus threat because it is the exact same color as the maritime flag that represents the vessel has no infected people on board,” someone wrote in a post that was widely shared and remixed across social media. Three days before the World Health Organization officially declared the coronavirus a pandemic, Trump was retweeting a QAnon-themed meme. “Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!” the president wrote on March 8, sharing a Photoshopped image of himself playing a violin overlaid with the words “Nothing can stop what is coming.”

From the March 2020 issue: The billion-dollar disinformation campaign to reelect the president

On March 9, Q himself issued a triptych of ominous posts that seemed definitive: The coronavirus is real, but welcome, and followers should not be afraid. The first post shared Trump’s tweet from the night before and repeated, “Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming.” The second said: “The Great Awakening is Worldwide.” The third was simple: “GOD WINS.”

A month later, on April 8, Q went on a posting spree, dropping nine posts over the span of six hours and touching on several of his favorite topics—God, Pizzagate, and the wickedness of the elites. “They will stop at nothing to regain power,” he wrote in one scathing post that alleged a coordinated propaganda effort by Democrats, Hollywood, and the media. Another accused Democrats of promoting “mass hysteria” about the coronavirus for political gain: “What is the primary benefit to keep public in mass-hysteria re: COVID‑19? Think voting. Are you awake yet? Q.” And he shared these verses from Ephesians: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Put on the full armor of God so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil.”

Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has become an object of scorn among QAnon supporters who don’t like the bad news he delivers or the way he has contradicted Trump publicly. In one March press conference, Trump referred to the State Department as the “Deep State Department,” and Fauci could be seen over the president’s shoulder, suppressing a laugh and covering his face. By then, QAnon had already declared Fauci irredeemably compromised, because WikiLeaks had unearthed a pair of emails he sent praising Hillary Clinton in 2012 and 2013. Sentiment about Fauci among QAnon supporters on social-media platforms ranges from “Fauci is a Deep State puppet” to “FAUCI is a BLACKHAT!!!”—the term QAnon uses for people who support the evil cabal that Q warns about. One person, using the hashtags #DeepStateCabal and #Qanon, tweeted this: “Watch Fauci’s hand signals and body language at the press conferences. What is he communicating?” Another shared an image of Fauci standing in a lab with Barack Obama, with the caption “Obama and ‘Dr.’ Fauci in the lab creating coronovirus [sic]. #DeepstateDoctor.” The Justice Department recently approved heightened security measures for Fauci because of the mounting volume of threats against him.

Read: If someone shares the ‘Plandemic’ video, how should you respond?

In the final days before Congress passed a $2 trillion economic-relief package in late March, Democrats insisted on provisions that would make it easier for people to vote by mail, prompting Q himself to weigh in with dismay: “These people are sick! Nothing can stop what is coming. Nothing.”

Illustration: Arsh Raziuddin; Ira Wyman / Getty; Evan El-Amin / Shutterstock; animation: Vishakha Darbha

III. BELIEVERS

On a bone-cold Thursday in early January, a crowd was swelling in downtown Toledo, Ohio. By lunchtime, seven hours before the start of Trump’s first campaign rally of the new year, the line to get into the Huntington Center had already snaked around two city blocks. The air was electric with possibility, and the whole scene possessed a Jimmy Buffett–meets–Michigan Militia atmosphere: lots of white people, a good deal of vaping, red-white-and-blue everything. Down the street, someone had affixed a two-story banner across the top of a burned-out brick building. It read: president trump, welcome to toledo, ohio: who is q … military intelligence? q+? (“Q+” is QAnon shorthand for Trump himself.) Vendors at the event were selling Q buttons and T-shirts. QAnon merchandise comes in a great variety; online, you can buy Great Awakening coffee ($14.99) and QAnon bracelets with tiny silver pizza charms ($20.17).

I worked my way toward the back of the line, making small talk and asking who, if anyone, knew anything about QAnon. One woman’s eyes lit up, and in a single fluid motion she unzipped and removed her jacket, then did a little jump so that her back was to me. I could see a Q made out of duct tape, which she’d pressed onto her red T-shirt. Her name was Lorrie Shock, and the first thing she wanted me to know was this: “We’re not a domestic-terror group.”

Shock was born in Ohio and never left, “a lifer,” as she put it. She had worked at a Bridgestone factory, making car parts, for most of her adult life. “Real hot and dirty work, but good money,” she told me. “I got three kids through school.” Today, in what she calls her preretirement job, she cares for adults with special needs, spending her days in a tender routine of playing games with them and helping them in and out of a swimming pool. Shock came to the Trump rally with her friend Pat Harger, who had retired after 32 years at Whirlpool. Harger’s wife runs a catering business, which is what had kept her from attending the rally that day. Harger and Shock are old friends. “Since the fourth grade,” Harger told me, “and we’re 57 years old.”

Now that Shock’s girls are grown and she’s not working a factory job, she has more time for herself. That used to mean reading novels in the evening—she doesn’t own a television—but now it means researching Q, who first came to her notice when someone she knew mentioned him on Facebook in 2017: “What caught my attention was ‘research.’ Do your own research. Don’t take anything for granted. I don’t care who says it, even President Trump. Do your own research, make up your own mind.”

Read: Trump needs conspiracy theories

The QAnon universe is sprawling and deep, with layer upon layer of context, acronyms, characters, and shorthand to learn. The “castle” is the White House. “Crumbs” are clues. CBTS stands for “calm before the storm,” and WWG1WGA stands for “Where we go one, we go all,” which has become an expression of solidarity among Q followers. (Both of these phrases, oddly, are used in the trailer for the 1996 Ridley Scott film White Squallwatch it on YouTube, and you’ll see that the comments section is flooded with pro-Q sentiment.) There is also a “Q clock,” which refers to a calendar some factions of Q supporters use to try to decode supposed clues based on time stamps of Q drops and Trump tweets.

At the height of her devotion, Shock was spending four to six hours a day reading and rereading Q drops, scouring documents online, taking notes. Now, she says, she spends closer to an hour or two a day. “When I first started, everybody thought I was crazy,” Shock said. That included her daughters, who are “very liberal Hillary and Bernie supporters,” Shock said. “I still love them. They think I’m crazy, but that’s all right.”

Harger, too, once thought Shock had lost it. “I was doubting her,” he told me. “I would send her texts saying, Lorrie.”

“He was like, ‘What the hell?’ ” Shock said, laughing. “So my comment to him would be ‘Do your own research.’ ”

“And I did,” Harger said. “And it’s like, Wow.”

Taking a page from Trump’s playbook, Q frequently rails against legitimate sources of information as fake. Shock and Harger rely on information they encounter on Facebook rather than news outlets run by journalists. They don’t read the local paper or watch any of the major television networks. “You can’t watch the news,” Shock said. “Your news channel ain’t gonna tell us shit.” Harger says he likes One America News Network. Not so long ago, he used to watch CNN, and couldn’t get enough of Wolf Blitzer. “We were glued to that; we always have been,” he said. “Until this man, Trump, really opened our eyes to what’s happening. And Q. Q is telling us beforehand the stuff that’s going to happen.” I asked Harger and Shock for examples of predictions that had come true. They could not provide specifics and instead encouraged me to do the research myself. When I asked them how they explained the events Q had predicted that never happened, such as Clinton’s arrest, they said that deception is part of Q’s plan. Shock added, “I think there were more things that were predicted that did happen.” Her tone was gentle rather than indignant.

Harger wanted me to know that he’d voted for Obama the first time around. He grew up in a family of Democrats. His dad was a union guy. But that was before Trump appeared and convinced Harger that he shouldn’t trust the institutions he always thought he could. Shock nodded alongside him. “The reason I feel like I can trust Trump more is, he’s not part of the establishment,” she said. At one point, Harger told me I should look into what happened to John F. Kennedy Jr.—who died in 1999, when his airplane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Martha’s Vineyard—suggesting that Hillary Clinton had had him assassinated. (Alternatively, a contingent of QAnon believers say that JFK Jr. faked his death and that he’s a behind-the-scenes Trump supporter, and possibly even Q himself. Some anticipate his dramatic public return so that he can serve as Trump’s running mate in 2020.) When I asked Harger whether there’s any evidence to support the assassination claim, he flipped my question around: “Is there any evidence not to?”

Peter Beinart: Trump’s fantasy world got him into this

Reading Shock’s Facebook page is an exercise in contradictions, a toggling between banality and hostility. There she is in a yellow kayak in her profile photo, bright-red hair spilling out of a ski hat, a giant smile on her face. There are the photos of her daughters, and of a granddaughter with Shirley Temple curls. Yet Q is never far away. On Christmas Eve, Shock shared one post that seemed to come straight out of the QAnon universe but also pulled in an older, classic conspiracy: “X marks the spot over Roswell NM. X17 Fifth Force Particle. X + Q Coincidence?” That same day, she shared a separate post suggesting that Michelle Obama is secretly a man. Someone responded with skepticism: “I am still not convinced. She shows and acts evil, but a man?” Shock’s reply: “Research it.” There was a post claiming that Representative Adam Schiff had raped the body of a dead boy at the Chateau Marmont, in Los Angeles—Harger shows up here, with a “huh??” in the comments—and a warning that George Soros was going after Christian evangelicals. In other posts, Shock playfully taunted “libs” and her “Trump-hating friends,” and also shared a video of her daughter singing Christmas carols.

In Toledo, I asked Shock if she had any theories about Q’s identity. She answered immediately: “I think it’s Trump.” I asked if she thinks Trump even knows how to use 4chan. The message board is notoriously confusing for the uninitiated, nothing like Facebook and other social platforms designed to make it easy to publish quickly and often. “I think he knows way more than what we think,” she said. But she also wanted me to know that her obsession with Q wasn’t about Trump. This had been something she was reluctant to speak about at first. Now, she said, “I feel God led me to Q. I really feel like God pushed me in this direction. I feel like if it was deceitful, in my spirit, God would be telling me, ‘Enough’s enough.’ But I don’t feel that. I pray about it. I’ve said, ‘Father, should I be wasting my time on this?’ … And I don’t feel that feeling of I should stop.”

Arthur Jones, the director of the documentary film Feels Good Man, which tells the story of how internet memes infiltrated politics in the 2016 presidential election, told me that QAnon reminds him of his childhood growing up in an evangelical-Christian family in the Ozarks. He said that many people he knew then, and many people he meets now in the most devout parts of the country, are deeply interested in the Book of Revelation, and in trying to unpack “all of its pretty-hard-to-decipher prophecies.” Jones went on: “I think the same kind of person would all of a sudden start pulling at the threads of Q and start feeling like everything is starting to fall into place and make sense. If you are an evangelical and you look at Donald Trump on face value, he lies, he steals, he cheats, he’s been married multiple times, he’s clearly a sinner. But you are trying to find a way that he is somehow part of God’s plan.”

You can’t always tell what kind of Q follower you’re encountering. Anyone using a Q hashtag could be a true believer, like Shock, or simply someone cruising a site and playing along for a vicarious thrill. Surely there are people who know that Q is a fantasy but participate because there’s an element of QAnon that converges with a live-action role-playing game. In the sprawling constellation of Q supporters, Shock and Harger seem prototypical. They happened upon Q and something clicked. The fable plugged neatly into their existing worldview.

IV. PROFESSIONALS

Q may be anonymous, but leaders of the QAnon movement have emerged in public and built their own large audiences. David Hayes is better known by his online handle: PrayingMedic. In his YouTube videos, he exudes the even-keeled authoritarian energy of a middle-school principal. PrayingMedic is one of the best-known QAnon evangelists on the planet. He has more than 300,000 Twitter followers and a similar number of YouTube subscribers. Hayes, a former paramedic, lives in a terra-cotta-roofed subdivision in Gilbert, Arizona, with his wife, Denise, an artist whom he met on the dating site Christian Mingle in 2007. Both describe themselves as former atheists who came to their faith in God, and to each other, late in life, after previous marriages. Hayes has been following Q since the beginning, or close to it. “Q Anon is pretty darn interesting,” he wrote on his Facebook page on December 12, 2017, six weeks after Q’s first post on 4chan. That same day, he wrote about a sudden calling he felt:

My dreams have suggested that God wants me to keep my attention focused on politics and current events. After some prayer, I’ve decided to do a regular news and current events show on Periscope. I’m trying to do one broadcast a day. (The videos are also being posted to my Youtube channel.) That is all.

Hayes is a superstar in the Q universe. His video “Q for Beginners Part 1” has been viewed more than 1 million times. “Some of the people who follow Q would consider themselves to be conspiracy theorists,” Hayes says in the video. “I do not consider myself to be a conspiracy theorist. I consider myself to be a Q researcher. I don’t have anything against people who like to follow conspiracies. That’s their thing. It’s not my thing.”

Read: The reason conspiracy videos work so well on YouTube

Hayes has developed a following in part because of his sheer ubiquity but also because he skillfully wears the mantle of a skepticI’m not one of those crazies. Hayes is not a QAnon hobbyist, though. He’s a professional. There are income streams to be tapped, modest but expanding. On Amazon, Hayes’s book Calm Before the Storm, the first in what he says could easily be a 10-book series of “Q Chronicles,” sells for $15.29. Hayes writes in the introduction that he and Denise have devoted their attention full-time to QAnon since 2017. “Denise and I have been blessed by those who have helped support us while we set aside our usual work to research Q’s messages,” he wrote. He has published several other books, which offer a glimpse into an earlier life. The titles include Hearing God’s Voice Made Simple, Defeating Your Adversary in the Court of Heaven, and American Sniper: Lessons in Spiritual Warfare. Hayes registered Praying Medic as a religious nonprofit in Washington State in 2018.

Hayes tells his followers that he thinks Q is an open-source intelligence operation, made possible by the internet and designed by patriots fighting corruption inside the intelligence community. His interpretation of Q is ultimately religious in nature, and centers on the idea of a Great Awakening. “I believe The Great Awakening has a double application,” Hayes wrote in a blog post in November 2019.

It speaks of an intellectual awakening—the awareness by the public to the truth that we’ve been enslaved in a corrupt political system. But the exposure of the unimaginable depravity of the elites will lead to an increased awareness of our own depravity. Self-awareness of sin is fertile ground for spiritual revival. I believe the long-prophesied spiritual awakening lies on the other side of the storm.

Q followers agree that a Great Awakening lies ahead, and will bring salvation. They differ in their personal preoccupations with respect to the here and now. Some in the QAnon world are highly focused on what they perceive as degeneracy in the mainstream media, a perception fueled in equal measure by Q and by Trump. Others obsess over the intelligence community and the notion of a deep state. An active subsection of Q followers probes the Jeffrey Epstein case. There are those who claim knowledge of a 16-year plan by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to destroy the United States by means of mass drought, weaponized disease, food shortages, and nuclear war. During the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, some Q followers promoted the idea that Trump was secretly working with Robert Mueller, and that the special counsel’s report would both exonerate Trump and lead to mass arrests of members of the corrupt cabal. (The eventual Mueller report, released in April 2019, neither exonerated Trump nor led to mass arrests.)

These divergent byways are elemental to QAnon’s staying power—this is a very welcoming belief system, warm in its tolerance for contradiction—and are also what makes it possible for a practical man like Hayes to play the role that he does. QAnon is complex and confusing. People from all over the internet seek guidance from someone who seems levelheaded. (Hayes was quick to respond to my emails but declined requests for an interview. He complained to me that journalists refuse to see QAnon for what it really is, and therefore cannot be trusted.)

The most prominent QAnon figures have a presence beyond the biggest social-media platforms and image boards. The Q universe encompasses numerous blogs, proprietary websites, and types of chat software, as well as alternative social-media platforms such as Gab, the site known for anti-Semitism and white nationalism, where many people banned from Twitter have congregated. Vloggers and bloggers promote their Patreon accounts, where people can pay them in monthly sums. There’s also money to be made from ads on YouTube. That seems to be the primary focus for Hayes, whose videos have been viewed more than 33 million times altogether. His “Q for Beginners” video includes ads from companies such as the vacation-rental site Vrbo and from The Epoch Times, an international pro-Trump newspaper. Q evangelists have taken a “publish everywhere” approach that is half outreach, half redundancy. If one platform cracks down on QAnon, as Reddit did, they won’t have to start from scratch somewhere else. Already embroiled in the battle between good and evil, QAnon has involved itself in another battle—between the notion of an open web for the people and a gated internet controlled by a powerful few.

Illustration: Arsh Raziuddin; animation: Vishakha Darbha

V. WHO IS Q?

Any new belief system runs into opposition. In December 2018, Matt Patten, a veteran SWAT-team sergeant in the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, in Florida, was photographed with Vice President Mike Pence on an airport tarmac. Patten wore a patch on his tactical vest that bore the letter Q. The photograph was tweeted by the vice president’s office and then went viral in the QAnon community. The tweet was quickly taken down. Patten was demoted. When I knocked on his door on a gloomy day in August, no one answered. But as I turned to leave, I noticed two large bumper stickers on the white mailbox out front. One said trump, and the other said #qanon: patriots fight.

Late last summer, Q himself lost his platform. He had migrated from 4chan (fearing that the site had been “infiltrated”) to the image board 8chan, and then 8chan went dark. Three days before I stood on Patten’s doorstep, 22 people had been killed in a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and police revealed that the alleged killer had posted a manifesto on 8chan just before carrying out the attack. The episode had eerie similarities to two other shootings. Four months earlier, in April 2019, the suspected shooter in a murderous rampage at a synagogue in Poway, California, had posted an anti-Semitic letter on 8chan. Weeks before that, the man who killed 51 worshippers at two New Zealand mosques had posted a white-supremacist manifesto on 8chan.

After El Paso, 8chan’s owner, Jim Watkins, was ordered to testify before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Watkins had bought the site four years earlier from its founder, Fredrick Brennan, now 26, who eventually cut all ties to 8chan. “Regrettably, this is at least the third act of white supremacist extremist violence linked to your website this year,” wrote Representatives Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, and Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama, when they summoned Watkins to Capitol Hill. “Americans deserve to know what, if anything, you, as the owner and operator, are doing to address the proliferation of extremist content on 8chan.”

8chan had already lost crucial services, which had forced it to shut down. The CEO of Cloudflare, which had helped protect the site from cyberattacks, explained his decision to drop 8chan in an open letter after the El Paso shooting: “The rationale is simple: They have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths.” Watkins promised to keep the site off the internet until after his congressional appearance. He is a former U.S. Army helicopter repairman who got into the business of websites while he was still in the military. Among other things, in 1997, he launched a successful porn site called Asian Bikini Bar. On his YouTube channel, where he posts under the username Watkins Xerxes, he frequently sings hymns, reads verses from the Bible, praises Trump, and touches on themes underlying QAnon—warning against the deep state and reminding his audience members that they are now “the actual reporting mechanism of the news.” He also shows off his fountain-pen collection and practices yoga. When he arrived on Capitol Hill, in September 2019, Watkins wore a bulbous silver Q pinned to his collar. His testimony was behind closed doors. In November, 8chan flickered back to life as 8kun. It was sporadically accessible, limping along through a series of cyberattacks. It received assistance from a Russian hosting service that is typically associated with spreading malware. When Q reappeared on 8kun, he used the same tripcode that he had used on 8chan. He posted other hints meant to verify the continuity of his identity, including an image of a notebook and a pen that had appeared in earlier posts.

Renée DiResta: The conspiracies are coming from inside the house

Fredrick Brennan’s theory is that Jim and his son Ron, who is the site’s administrator, knew 8kun needed Q to attract users. “I definitely, definitely, 100 percent believe that Q either knows Jim or Ron Watkins, or was hired by Jim or Ron Watkins,” Brennan told me. Jim and Ron have both denied knowing Q’s identity. “I don’t know who Q is,” Ron told me in a direct message on Twitter. Jim told an interviewer on One America News Network in September 2019: “I don’t know who QAnon is. Really, we run an anonymous website.” Both insist that they care about maintaining 8kun only because it is a platform for unfettered free speech. “8kun is like a piece of paper, and the users decide what is written on it,” Ron told me. “There are many different topics and users from many different backgrounds.” But their interest in Q is well documented. In February, Jim started a super PAC called Disarm the Deep State, which echoes Q’s messages and which is running paid ads on 8kun.

Brennan has long been feuding with the Watkinses. Jim is suing Brennan for libel in the Philippines, where they both lived until recently, and Brennan is actively fighting Jim’s attempts to become a naturalized citizen there. “They kept Q alive,” Brennan told me. “We wouldn’t be talking about this right now if Q didn’t go on the new 8kun. The entire reason we’re talking about this is they’re directly related to Q. And, you know, I worry constantly that there is going to be, as early as November 2020, some kind of shooting or something related to Q if Trump loses. Or parents killing their children to save them from the hell-world that is to come because the deep state has won. These are real possibilities. I just feel like what they have done is totally irresponsible to keep Q going.”

The story of Q is premised on the need for Q to remain anonymous. It’s why Q originally picked 4chan, one of the last places built for anonymity on the social web. “I’ve often related Q to previous figures like John Titor or Satoshi Nakamoto,” Brennan told me, referring to two legends of internet anonymity. Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the unknown creator of bitcoin. John Titor is the name used on several message boards in 2000 and 2001 by someone claiming to be a military time traveler from the year 2036.

QAnon adherents see Q’s anonymity as proof of Q’s credibility—despite their deep mistrust of unnamed sources in the media. Every faction of QAnon has its own hunches, alliances, and interpersonal dramas related to the question of Q’s identity. The theories fit into three broad groups. In the first group are theories that assume Q is a single individual who has been posting all alone this entire time. This is where you’ll find the people who say that Trump himself is Q, or even that PrayingMedic is Q. (This category also includes the possibility, raised by people outside of QAnon, that Q is a lone Trump supporter who started posting as a form of fan fiction, not realizing it would take off; and the idea that Q began posting in order to parody Trump and his supporters, not anticipating that people would take him seriously.) The second group of theories holds that the original Q posted continuously for a while, but then something changed. This second category includes Brennan’s idea that the Watkinses are now paying Q, or are paying someone to carry on as Q, or are even acting as Q themselves. The third group of theories holds that Q is a collective, with a small number of people sharing access to the account. This third category includes the notion that Q is a new kind of open-source military-intelligence agency.

Read: I was a teenage conspiracy theorist

Many QAnon adherents see significance in Trump tweets containing words that begin with the letter Q. Recent world events have rewarded them amply. “I am a great friend and admirer of the Queen & the United Kingdom,” Trump began one tweet on March 29. The day before, he had tweeted this: “I am giving consideration to a QUARANTINE.” The Q crowd seized on both tweets, arguing that if you ignore most of the letters in the messages, you’ll find a confession from Trump: “I am … Q.”

VI. REASON VERSUS FAITH

In a Miami coffee shop last year, I met with a man who has gotten a flurry of attention in recent years for his research on conspiracy theories—a political-science professor at the University of Miami named Joseph Uscinski. I have known Uscinski for years, and his views are nuanced, deeply informed, and far from anything you would consider knee-jerk partisanship. Many people assume, he told me, that a propensity for conspiracy thinking is predictable along ideological lines. That’s wrong, he explained. It’s better to think of conspiracy thinking as independent of party politics. It’s a particular form of mind-wiring. And it’s generally characterized by acceptance of the following propositions: Our lives are controlled by plots hatched in secret places. Although we ostensibly live in a democracy, a small group of people run everything, but we don’t know who they are. When big events occur—pandemics, recessions, wars, terrorist attacks—it is because that secretive group is working against the rest of us.

QAnon isn’t a far-right conspiracy, the way it’s often described, Uscinski went on, despite its obviously pro-Trump narrative. And that’s because Trump isn’t a typical far-right politician. Q appeals to people with the greatest attraction to conspiracy thinking of any kind, and that appeal crosses ideological lines.

Many of the people most prone to believing conspiracy theories see themselves as victim-warriors fighting against corrupt and powerful forces. They share a hatred of mainstream elites. That helps explain why cycles of populism and conspiracy thinking seem to rise and fall together. Conspiracy thinking is at once a cause and a consequence of what Richard Hofstadter in 1964 famously described as “the paranoid style” in American politics. But do not make the mistake of thinking that conspiracy theories are scribbled only in the marginalia of American history. They color every major news event: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the moon landing, 9/11. They have helped sustain consequential eruptions, such as McCarthyism in the 1950s and anti-Semitism at any moment you choose. But QAnon is different. It may be propelled by paranoia and populism, but it is also propelled by religious faith. The language of evangelical Christianity has come to define the Q movement. QAnon marries an appetite for the conspiratorial with positive beliefs about a radically different and better future, one that is preordained.

Read: The paranoid style in American entertainment

That was part of the reason Uscinski’s mother, Shelly, 62, was attracted to QAnon. Shelly, who lives in New Hampshire, was tooling around on YouTube a couple of years ago, looking for how-to videos—she can’t remember for what, exactly, maybe a tutorial on how to get her car windows sparkling-clean—and the algorithm served up QAnon. She remembers a feeling of magnetic attraction. “Like, Wow, what is this? ” she recalled when I spoke with her by phone. “For me, it was revealing some things that maybe I was hoping would come to pass.” She sensed that Q knew her anxieties—as if someone was taking her train of thought and “actually verbalizing it.” Shelly’s frustrations are broad, and directed primarily at the institutions she sees as broken. She’s fed up with the education system, the financial system, the media. “Even our churches are out of whack,” she said. One of the things that resonated most with her about Q was his disgust with “the fake news.” She gets her information mostly from Fox News, Twitter, and the New Hampshire Union Leader. “In my lifetime, I guess, things have gotten progressively worse,” Shelly said. She added a little later: “Q gives us hope. And it’s a good thing, to be hopeful.”

Shelly likes that Q occasionally quotes from scripture, and she likes that he encourages people to pray. In the end, she said, QAnon is about something so much bigger than Trump or anyone else. “There are QAnon followers out there,” Shelly said, “who suggest that what we’re going through now, in this crazy political realm we’re in now, with all of the things that are happening worldwide, is very biblical, and that this is Armageddon.”

I asked her if she thinks the end of the world is upon us. “It wouldn’t surprise me,” she said.

Read: The normalization of conspiracy culture

Joseph Uscinski is disturbed by his mother’s belief in QAnon. He’s not comfortable talking about it. And Shelly doesn’t quite appreciate the irony of the family’s situation, because she doesn’t believe QAnon is a form of conspiracy thinking in the first place. At one point in our conversation, when I referred to QAnon as a conspiracy theory, she quickly interrupted: “It’s not a theory. It’s the foretelling of things to come.” She laughed hard when I asked if she had ever tried to get Joseph to believe in QAnon. The answer was an unequivocal no: “I’m his mom, so I love him.”

VII. APOCALYPSE

Watchkeepers for the End of Days can easily find signs of impending doom—in comets and earthquakes, in wars and pandemics. It has always been this way. In 1831, a Baptist preacher in rural New York named William Miller began to publicly share his prediction that the Second Coming of Jesus was imminent. Eventually he settled on a date: October 22, 1844. When the sun came up on October 23, his followers, known as the Millerites, were crushed. The episode would come to be known as the Great Disappointment. But they did not give up. The Millerites became the Adventists, who in turn became the Seventh-day Adventists, who now have a worldwide membership of more than 20 million. “These people in the QAnon community—I feel like they are as deeply delusional, as deeply invested in their beliefs, as the Millerites were,” Travis View, one of the hosts of a podcast called QAnon Anonymous, which subjects QAnon to acerbic analysis, told me. “That makes me pretty confident that this is not something that is going to go away with the end of the Trump presidency.”

QAnon carries on a tradition of apocalyptic thinking that has spanned thousands of years. It offers a polemic to empower those who feel adrift. In his classic 1957 book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, the historian Norman Cohn examined the emergence of apocalyptic thinking over many centuries. He found one common condition: This way of thinking consistently emerged in regions where rapid social and economic change was taking place—and at periods of time when displays of spectacular wealth were highly visible but unavailable to most people. This was true in Europe during the Crusades in the 11th century, and during the Black Death in the 14th century, and in the Rhine Valley in the 16th century, and in William Miller’s New York in the 19th century. It is true in America in the 21st century.

The Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are thriving religious movements indigenous to America. Do not be surprised if QAnon becomes another. It already has more adherents by far than either of those two denominations had in the first decades of their existence. People are expressing their faith through devoted study of Q drops as installments of a foundational text, through the development of Q-worshipping groups, and through sweeping expressions of gratitude for what Q has brought to their lives. Does it matter that we do not know who Q is? The divine is always a mystery. Does it matter that basic aspects of Q’s teachings cannot be confirmed? The basic tenets of Christianity cannot be confirmed. Among the people of QAnon, faith remains absolute. True believers describe a feeling of rebirth, an irreversible arousal to existential knowledge. They are certain that a Great Awakening is coming. They’ll wait as long as they must for deliverance.

Trust the plan. Enjoy the show. Nothing can stop what is coming.


This article appears in the June 2020 print edition with the headline “Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming.” It was published online on May 14, 2020.

Adrienne LaFrance is the executive editor of The Atlantic. She was previously a senior editor and staff writer at The Atlantic, and the editor of TheAtlantic.com.

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www.theatlantic.com /politics/archive/2020/05/trumps-favorite-tv-network-post-parody/611353/

Trump’s Favorite TV Network Is Post-parody

Devin Gordon
19-25 minutes

One America News, or OAN, or OANN—whichever you like, it’s all the same thing—is Donald Trump’s favorite cable-news channel. Mostly this is because One America News seems to agree with Trump about everything, in the same way a dog agrees to chase its own tail. Every day, Trump does something that catches OAN’s attention, and it’s off to the races. He’s part ringleader, part muse. If you’re wondering just how deep the fealty goes, consider this actual headline that ran on oann.com at the end of March, when Trump was still in his denial phase about the coronavirus: “President Handling Emergency Well in First Term.” So well, in fact, we should just give him that second term right now, wouldn’t you say? Every so often, Trump and Fox News have a lover’s spat, and this is when he really turns on the charm toward OAN—retweeting its praise of him, calling on its correspondents at press briefings two days in a row. Or, to put the relationship in tabloid terms familiar to Trump: He treats OAN like his sidepiece, and Fox News like a future ex-wife.

One America News predates the Trump presidency—it launched in 2013—so its rise is less a response to Trumpism than an extension of the besieged, paranoid worldview that got him elected in the first place. In 2018, well after the debunking of Pizzagate—the allegation that Hillary Clinton and a secret cabal were running a pedophile ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant—the network hired one of Pizzagate’s chief boosters, Jack Posobiec, as an on-air correspondent. (Posobiec has backed down from the Pizzagate theory, telling The Washington Post in 2016 that he thought his live-streamed look into the pizzeria “could just show it was a regular pizza place.”) OAN covered the so-called migrant caravan—a slow-moving wave of migrants that began rolling north from Central America in 2018—as if it were a Category 5 hurricane. OAN has referred to the 2016 murder of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee employee, as if it might have been a political assassination; tin-foil-hat corners of the internet have connected it to the leaking of DNC emails. Recently, OAN has been advancing the theory, without any evidence to support it, that the coronavirus was developed in a Chinese bioweapons lab, and spread from there. Soon enough, The New York Times reported that administration officials were pushing the intelligence services to investigate, even as the theory was debunked on the front page.

“Our big secret and a key differentiator of OAN from other cable news networks is that the star of OAN’s news lineup is the news, not the talent,” Charles Herring, the network’s president, told me by email recently. Now on the one hand, ouch—on-air talent likes nothing more than hearing their boss say they weren’t chosen for their talent. On the other hand, he’s right: At OAN, what comes out of their mouths is far more important than how well they say it. To watch OAN is to experience the Trump presidency the way Trump himself would cover it, if he built a network from the ground up and then, as he did with his administration, hired amateurs to run it. I spent hours watching OAN, and the whole time I found myself yearning for the skill and professionalism of Fox News. In the age of alternative facts, though, a news network doesn’t need polish to be dangerous. All the talent needs to do is look into the camera and read off the teleprompter.

Trump’s frequent shout-outs have turned OAN into a minor media sensation, and its coverage has been described as “fast paced,” which is only true if you’re comparing it with the burning-Yule-log channel. As I watched One America, it gradually dawned on me that I was watching Anchorman. Everything was so earnest and slapdash, and so transparently inane. In both appearance and metabolism, OAN is a nostalgia machine—familiar, reassuring, the Turner Classic Movies of cable-news networks. It’s built for the members of an aging #MAGA army who want to be comforted by news the way they remember it. The same good news, the same bad news. The same invisible enemies too, so that even the nightmares come wrapped in a warm blanket. Gang violence at the top of the hour, baby pandas at the bottom. OAN is post-parody: It’s the straight truth for Trump fans, and completely surreal for everyone else.

Read: The pro-Trump conspiracy theory that’s becoming a new religion

OAN was born on the Fourth of July seven years ago, when Trump was already deep into his birtherism phase. The network is headquartered in an office-park cul-de-sac in San Diego, a city that, in addition to being the setting for Anchorman, is the longtime corporate base of One America’s founder, the microchip multimillionaire and aging paterfamilias Robert Herring, Charles’s father. Robert built his fortune as a manufacturer of circuit boards, cashing out of two companies in 2000 with $122 million. He and Charles broke into television in 2004 with WealthTV, now known as AWE (A Wealth of Entertainment), a cable channel that would feature shows such as Cheese Chasers and Dream Cruises. Robert also started giving money to conservative causes. In 2005, he made news when he offered $1 million to the husband of Terri Schiavo—a young woman who spent years in a vegetative state as her husband and parents fought in court over whether to end her life—if he agreed to keep her on life support. (He declined the offer.) When Robert and his son decided that Fox News had gotten too soft, too centrist, they launched One America to compete with it.

Robert Herring does not poke his head out much, granting only the occasional brief interview to his local San Diego Union-Tribune. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, though, he has been tweeting about it regularly. On April 20, he posted about hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug that Trump has touted as a cure for COVID-19—and now claims to have taken himself—despite the lack of evidence that hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for the coronavirus and the emerging evidence that it may cause harm:

President Trump was the first to tell us about hydroxychloroquine. Now there are MANY reports of people taking it and being 100% cured. So what happened to the trials in New York? Where are the results? Why aren't more doctors pushing it and why aren't people allowed to use it?

— Robert Herring (@RobHerring) April 20, 2020

Not a word of this tweet is accurate, not even the part about Trump being the first to tell us about the drug. Robert just lobbed it out there, and then vanished behind his Twitter account. Like its founder, One America does not reveal much about itself. A two-page media kit on the network website carries this boast about One America: “Fast becoming the 4th rated national cable news channel!” But I couldn’t find a single press contact. The anchors seem to have written their own bios, possibly copied from their Tinder profiles. Emily Finn, who is 23, according to anchorswiki.com, is described as someone who loves traveling (“especially to Dublin, Ireland … her most favorite place in the whole world”) as well as “jamming to some classic rock music, or soaking up the sun at the beach.” I scoured the site, clicking on every tab, until I happened to click on a page called “Affiliate Relations,” and there it was, kindly supplied for OAN viewers: Charles Herring’s direct email address. So I emailed him. He emailed right back.

Conor Friedersdorf: Maybe Trump isn’t lying

“One America News Network is a small family business,” Charles wrote when I told him I’d been surprised to find his personal contact information right there on the OAN site. “Our staff does the best job they can do with the resources we have. Many of our staff members play numerous roles, including me.” In another email, Charles wrote: “Glad that you have taken the time to watch on Roku (and thank you for the $4.99 per month!😊) You’ll get a good sense of the channel by watching, rather than reading opinions from advocacy ‘journalists’ [who] admit they have never watched the channel. Let me know how I can be helpful.”

Anyone with a mobile device can watch One America in chunks on YouTube, or through the network’s app, or on the streaming service Roku, but the majority of One America’s viewers are, like Trump, TV watchers. In order to watch it on TV, you have to live in the right place, because only a smattering of U.S. cable operators carry OAN, representing a potential pool of about 35 million households, or less than a third of the total U.S. television audience. The network’s precise viewership remains a mystery. The Herrings don’t participate in Nielsen surveys and have declined to share subscriber data. But according to the scant available data from Comscore and conversations with industry analysts, at least 34.5 million of those households are not watching OAN.

The more you search for evidence of OAN viewers, in fact, the less they seem to exist. “If you look at the constellation of sources around the 2020 election, OAN registers but it doesn’t make the top thousand,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a Web 2.0 pioneer and media and public-policy professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “That surprised me … but it seems like they’re really focused on being a TV network rather than a multimedia platform.” Indeed, most of the segments on OAN’s YouTube page have just a few thousand views. OAN often gets compared to Breitbart News, but it exemplifies a reversal of Breitbart’s strategy under Steve Bannon, which sought to leverage social media aggressively. One America may be relatively new, but it seems almost pre-web.

Breitbart really embraced this idea that it wanted to be shareable in all these sorts of formats—they wanted to show up in video, they wanted to go viral,” Zuckerman told me. “I don’t think that’s the game OAN is playing.”

Charles Herring was right: In order to understand OAN, you have to take in every second of airtime, from the Wikimedia stock footage of pills on a factory belt to the advertisements for military-grade tactical sunglasses. And then you have to think about what the hell happened in the world to produce such a sealed-off vision of modern life—half-comforting, half-paranoid, like a Truman Show for angry retirees. Every so often, you feel an invisible hand at work. On April 17, shortly after Trump picked a fight with the protective-mask manufacturer 3M, One America aired a segment about a San Antonio–area nurse who’d made a medical-grade face mask that, according to the OAN anchor’s opening line, “works even better than 3M’s N95 mask.” The nurse boasted about her mask’s 99.5 percent filtration rate (which, if true, would be better than 3M’s) and the fact that so far she’d made 600 of them. The premise of this segment seemed to be: Eat it, 3M! Just a few commercial breaks later, an advertisement urged viewers who’d suffered hearing damage from faulty earplugs to join a class-action lawsuit against … 3M. Coincidence? Maybe. In One America’s America, though, there are no coincidences. Everything is a conspiracy.

All of One America’s anchors bear an uncanny resemblance to more famous anchors on other networks. The bespectacled, babyish-faced Alex Salvi hosts a prime-time show called After Hours that airs at 10 p.m., but before you get any naughty ideas, it’s more like watching a high-school production of All In With Chris Hayes. Then there’s Graham Ledger, who spent nearly 15 years anchoring San Diego’s KFMB-TV local news, which means that, yes, prior to joining WealthTV and One America, he was Anchorman’s Ron Burgundy. You could spend all day fuming about border security and still fall asleep face-first into a bowl of Ledger’s word soup. One of the soft bigotries of right-leaning opinion journalism is that brunettes don’t get to be righteously indignant—this is a job for spitfire blondes. Liz Wheeler, the host of 9 p.m.’s Tipping Point, is a slightly desiccated Megyn Kelly whose hobbies include emasculating the libs. If Ledger is OAN’s bid to take back the Anchorman archetype, Wheeler is a conservative fantasy of Ron Burgundy’s love interest and rival co-anchor, Veronica Corningstone.

Doppelgängers abound. Patrick Hussion, who hosts OAN nightly news at 5 p.m., which is technically the late afternoon, looks haunted, like a half-in-the-bag David Muir. John Hines, who interviews many of OAN’s big gets—regulars include Representative Devin Nunes of California and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar—has mastered Chris Wallace’s very sober manner, right down to the very sober head tilt. Wallace, though, is a born inquisitor. Hines is trained to heel. One afternoon, I watched him hold an expression of squinty encouragement for nearly five unbroken minutes as Nunes went on about a “highly suspicious” weapons lab in Wuhan and about the World Health Organization’s alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

If you’ve encountered OAN out in the world, though, it’s probably not because of Ledger or Hines or Hussion. One America gets talked about for one overriding reason: Trump keeps calling on its correspondents during press conferences. By now, a pattern has emerged. He calls on an OAN correspondent; the correspondent asks a bewildering question; everyone in the briefing room turns around to see who the hell just asked the bewildering question; then Trump thanks the correspondent for serving up such an incisive meatball. For weeks, Trump labored to shift blame for the pandemic onto China by referring to the coronavirus as the “China virus” or “Wuhan virus,” provoking charges of thinly veiled racism. He received a helpful boost from OAN’s chief White House correspondent, Chanel Rion, whose name is pronounced Sha-nell Ree-ohn. (Rion is Korean American; her father’s surname is Ryan.) Her question on the matter was more akin to a preemptive defense with a question mark stuck on the end: “Mr. President, do you consider the term Chinese food to be racist because it is food that originated from China?”

Rion does seem to have a knack for head-scratching behavior. According to a Daily Mail investigation, she changed her surname from Dayn-Ryan to Rion shortly before applying for a White House security clearance (which is a peculiar moment to change your name). The newspaper reported that Rion’s father, Dann Ryan, has gone by the names Christopher Preboth, Dan Ryan, Danford Nmi Dayn-Ryan, Michael David Ryan, and David Michael Ryan. One reason he may have changed his name so many times is because, according to the Daily Mail account, he kept getting accused of defrauding people in real-estate scams.

Ellen Cushing: I was a teenage conspiracist

Breaking news is very expensive and, for the Herrings and One America, very overrated. Charles Herring has said that his family pumps tens of millions of dollars into One America, but for a national TV-news operation, that’s pennies in a bottomless well. In all the hours I spent watching One America during the pandemic, I never saw evidence of a second camera in the studio. I never saw a field correspondent deliver a report from anywhere other than the White House. Some of the male anchors should not be dressing themselves.

In any case, why break news when you can just repeat the already broken stuff? When I emailed Charles about what he considers the high points of OAN’s history as a news network—an incisive meatball of my own—he didn’t seize the open invitation to boast. “The high points,” he replied, “are simply executing on our mission, namely providing credible national and international news. Having staff break important news stories is always a high point for any news organization.” It sure is. But he didn’t name any of those stories.

I thought Charles might tout the network’s hard-hitting coverage of the 2020 presidential election, in particular its coverage of Joe Biden. A vague theme emerged from the many segments I watched—see if you can spot it: “Joe Biden stumbled through another interview today …” “Concerns about his cognitive decline are reportedly on the rise …” “Joe Biden’s gaffes continue—that’s according to his harshest critics.” (Yes, even Biden’s harshest critics were willing to speak out.) The anchors hit their prescribed marks with a mixture of amusement and pity. They could barely contain themselves at a clip of Biden referring to the coronavirus as “the Luhan virus.”

In my email exchange with Charles, I tried to nail down a few more answers. Given the tenor of One America’s pandemic coverage, I asked him if he personally knew anyone who had become ill with COVID-19. For some reason, he didn’t want to reply on the record. I also asked him for examples of times OAN has had to correct its work, because I couldn’t find very many myself. “Unfortunately, we make errors on a frequent basis,” he replied. “Most are very minor and simply corrected. At times, we’ve made on air corrections.” One correction I did find was a “report removal” tweet walking back an infidelity accusation; the tweet repeated the original accusation and stated that the item was removed “pending additional sourcing.” Charles is right about how often One America gets things wrong, but wrong about how often One America sets them right.

Despite its tiny audience, One America can still be a useful vector for propagandists, both foreign and domestic, even unwittingly. A conspiracy theory that pops up only in, say, a Russian propaganda organ, or in the mouth of a spiral-eyed congressman, can’t travel as widely as one that receives some sort of American media imprimatur, however shabby.

This requires a bit of a dance to work. For instance, a guest can speculate ominously about Chinese plots, but the interviewer has to sit there, thunderstruck by the logic of it all, and not ask even the most basic of questions. Okay, walk me through this: Scientists in a Chinese bioweapons lab developed the coronavirus and then ... what? Turned it loose on their own people? Or did it get out by accident—a monkey escaped, a test tube spilled, that sort of thing? Liberated from critical probing, innuendo does its work.

For years, coastal elites roared with laughter at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as they dressed up as newsmen and turned a familiar ritual of American life into a nightly punch line. Throughout the Obama presidency, liberals comforted themselves with the idea that they’d mocked a certain kind of news program out of existence, and that sanity had triumphed. But during Barack Obama’s second term, the post-truth pendulum swung back hard, from left to far right, from parody to propaganda, from Obama doctrine to Trumpism.

One America may be Donald Trump’s favorite news network, but that doesn’t mean he stays up all night watching it. If there’s one thing we can all agree that Trump really does know something about, it’s good (“good”) television, and I just can’t picture him having any patience for One America’s production values. “The key to success in this space is that you actually have to look enough like a news network to have some influence … and that’s what Breitbart did incredibly well,” Zuckerman, the media analyst, said. “It really has to have luster and gloss to it. And then when it’s simultaneously disturbing, that’s when it has power.” OAN, though, skipped the luster-and-gloss part. Zuckerman went on, “If you don’t have it—even if the product is really provocative—it’s going to fail.”

So many times while watching One America, I went back and forth about how “dangerous” it is, how alarmed we should be, what threat level it represents. One America’s sponsorship roster remains on the skimpy side—appliance insurance, class-action suits against Trump foes, a selection from the William Shatner oeuvre. The network has survived this long only because of the oxygen hose that Trump provides. And when he’s gone? One America isn’t Fox News. The Herrings aren’t the Murdochs. Someone else will replace them. It might be someone with much better news chops. It might be someone more insidiously adept at using the cover of journalism to erode trust in journalism. It might even be people with ties to Trump. According to news reports, the investment firm owned by the family of the Republican National Committee co-chair and Texas investor Tommy Hicks Jr., a friend of Donald Trump Jr., has been exploring possible options.

Charles Herring demurred when I asked him about the rumors. “We didn’t build OAN to sell it and we are excited about the future,” he wrote. “We’ll look at any growth opportunities, yet we are not looking to sell our business.” In that case, for the time being, let’s savor a virtue of the network that just about everyone can acknowledge: It’s unwatchable.

Devin Gordon is a writer based in New York City.

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www.theatlantic.com /politics/archive/2020/05/conspiracy-theories-civil-war/612283/

The Conspiracy Theories That Fueled the Civil War

Annika Neklason
11-14 minutes

Photo-illustration by Damon Davis

In the months leading up to the Civil War, fear festered in southern living rooms and legislative chambers. Newspapers reported that the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, held a “hatred of the South and its institutions [that would] cause him to use all the power at hand to destroy our country” and that his vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, was not only sympathetic to the plight of black Americans but was himself part black—“what we call,” the editor of one Charleston, South Carolina, paper stated, “a mulatto.” Warnings circulated in pamphlets and the press that an antislavery federal government would inspire a wave of violent slave revolts and then allow the South to burn, rather than stepping in to quell resistance. Texas’s declaration of secession asserted that northern abolitionists had for decades been sending “emissaries” to “bring blood and carnage to our firesides.” Georgia’s insisted that the “avowed purpose” of Republican leaders was to “subvert our society and subject us not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes [and] our altars.”

These claims were not relegated to the fringes of southern society; they emanated from its center. The most powerful people and institutions in the region voiced and acted upon them as fact. But they were unfounded: conspiracy theories, born of white supremacy and the desire to justify and maintain slavery. Even as they helped shield the antebellum South against the rising abolitionism in the North and in other countries, these theories deepened sectional divisions and made the question of slavery all but impossible to settle peacefully. They helped fuel the deadliest war in the nation’s history. And their violent legacy has lingered across centuries.

The lies might not have spread so far or engendered so much violence if not for the real threat, and the real fear, that they tapped into. There was no great sectional war planned to root out slavery in the South, no plot among Lincoln’s allies to execute a mass murder of slaveholders and their families. But there were slave revolts. And those slave revolts could become deadly. In the Caribbean, a series of mass rebellions broke out in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The most successful of these, the Haitian Revolution, forged a new free state out of a bloody conflict that killed tens of thousands of Europeans and white colonists, along with more than 100,000 slaves and freedmen. In the United States, where slaves remained a minority of southern state populations, violent uprisings were more limited, but still occurred: Individual slaves lashed out; groups of fugitives fought off slave catchers; and, every so often, an organized rebellion was planned.

These uprisings contradicted the narratives that southern slaveholders had constructed. In their telling, slaves were well cared for and content, provided with a better life than they could ever build for themselves in freedom—a life that would give them no good reason to turn on their owners.

To square this defense of slavery with the threat of resistance, southern slaveowners “over time shifted toward a more conspiratorial view,” Matthew J. Clavin, an American- and Atlantic-history professor at the University of Houston, told me. “Slaveowners blamed outsiders. Or they blamed free black people. Or they blamed foreign emissaries from London [for] trying to incite their slaves to rebel.”

Writing in The Atlantic in 1861 about the free black man Denmark Vesey’s thwarted plans to lead an uprising in Charleston, the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson noted that the first official report on the revolt considered a range of possible motivations for the rebels—including “Congressional eloquence,” “a Church squabble,” and “mistaken indulgences”—but not that slavery itself might be to blame. “It never seems to occur to any of these spectators,” Higginson observed, “that these people rebelled simply because they were slaves and wished to be free.”

Abolitionists were a favorite boogeyman in slaveholders’ stories. Antislavery pamphlets and speeches were also cited in reports about Vesey’s plans as a “means for inflaming the minds of the colored population” and instigating rebellion.

Such accusations were common in the first half of the 19th century, Clavin noted. “There would be episodes of a slave burning a slave owner’s house to the ground or slitting an overseer’s throat,” he said. “And there would be a wealthy abolitionist from New York City who would give a speech, and the speech didn’t incite violence, didn’t encourage anyone to run away, but six months later, southerners would be blaming that northern orator for causing the slave disturbance. It really [was] just an unbelievable ignorance of the facts used to create a community-wide response that was anti-abolitionist.”

John Brown’s attempt to start a mass slave rebellion in Virginia in 1859 seemed to confirm these sentiments. Brown was like a character straight out of a conspiracy theory: a white abolitionist who intended to arm slaves and turn them against their owners with the backing of a secretive network of antislavery supporters in New England (one of whom laid out the conspiracy in detail in The Atlantic years later).

For southerners, the John Brown rebellion “lent credence to that conspiratorial thinking that The abolitionists are coming, that Abolitionists are out to get us, that Abolitionists are encouraging slave revolts,” Clavin said. But Brown’s raid was, in reality, “an absolute anomaly. Very few, if any, abolitionists, black or white, were literally willing to start a slave insurrection themselves.”

And slaveholders knew it. “They overstated the threat from abolitionists,” Clavin said. “They did that on purpose, because it served their intellectual needs”—allowing them to unite the South against a common enemy and to defend the narrative that slaves were docile and content.

At the same time, slaveholders worked to further unite the white South in fear of rebellion by circulating the “diametrically opposed image” of enslaved people as innately violent and dangerous, Manisha Sinha, an American-history professor at the University of Connecticut and the author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, told me. The revolutionaries in Haiti, for example, were portrayed not as “freedom fighters, but as barbaric people who descended into completely chaotic violence for violence’s sake,” she said.

The abolitionist John Weiss detailed how the revolution was transformed into a scary story for southerners—commonly called “the Horrors of San Domingo”—in an 1862 article for The Atlantic. “The Haytian bugbear” had been wielded by pro-slavery forces “to render anti-slavery sentiment odious” and “to defeat the great act of justice and the people’s great necessity” of emancipation, he wrote.

The specter of mass uprising spread “both in public and private narratives,” Sinha said. Southerners grew to fear that “at the moment of emancipation” slaves “were going to wage a huge Haitian Revolution–like rebellion that would kill all whites and establish ‘black supremacy,’” or that they “were just going to rise up, rape all white women, and that would be the end of whiteness.”

These conspiracy theories made an existential threat out of emancipation, and insidious enemies out of northern antislavery forces. Eventually, they became so powerful that southern leaders decided to break from the Union and launch the Civil War. Their racist defenses of slavery could not admit the possibility of a peaceable emancipation such as the one that Lincoln and northern abolitionists actually sought. So after decades of preaching that abolition would mean sweeping violence, southern leaders brought that violence on themselves—and hastened the end of slavery in the process.

Slavery was, however, survived by the racist fears intended to protect it. Sinha traced their legacy through generations of murder, incarceration, and exclusion, from the “regime of racial terror” in the postwar South to the restrictive immigration laws of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, all the way up to the “authoritarian mindsets, conspiratorial ways of thinking, and demonization of the other” that continue to pervade American politics in the present day. The belief in abolitionist terror and black violence that southern slaveholders had constructed, she explained, made the prospect of “a republic of equal citizens” feel like an existential threat not only to the culture of white supremacy but to all the white people who lived in it. The groups of people embodying the threat have changed and expanded over time: from slaves to Asian immigrants to civil-rights activists to Muslim Americans. But the fear has never entirely gone away. Through the lens of that fear, racist violence, such as that practiced by the Ku Klux Klan, and laws, such as voting restrictions or Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban,” have been reframed as protective measures. Conspiratorial vigilance and authoritarianism become shields against an imagined revolution.

In The Atlantic’s first abolitionist article, titled “Where Will It End?,” Edmund Quincy reflected on how that kind of racist and conspiratorial political culture fed on silence and misinformation. “The slaveholders, having the wealth, and nearly all the education that the South can boast of,” he wrote, “create the public sentiment and … control the public affairs of their region, so as best to secure their own supremacy. No word of dissent to the institutions under which they live, no syllable of dissatisfaction, even, with any of the excesses they stimulate, can be breathed in safety.”

The antebellum South stands as a cautionary tale about what can happen when conspiracy theories are projected from a state’s highest platforms: by the richest men, the highest-ranking officials, the most widely read publications. Their lies were pervasive, permeating the South through decades of speeches and articles and pamphlets. Contradictory voices were dismissed as less-than-human or demonized for inciting mass murder. The false narrative became the foundation for a real regime.

In his Atlantic piece, Quincy also anticipated that “a wide-spread spirit of discontent” would eventually provoke resistance from within the South. He thought that resistance would come from non-slaveholding white southerners, but in the end, it came from the slaves themselves. For years, they lived in the same echo chamber as their owners, hearing conspiracy theories about abolitionists who would fight for their freedom and a war that would end their bondage for good. When the Civil War began, many of them accepted the theories as truth, and acted on them. They abandoned their plantations. They lobbied to join the Union Army. And finally, just as their former owners had feared, they took up arms against the South.

Annika Neklason is a former assistant editor at The Atlantic.

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www.theatlantic.com /international/archive/2020/06/conspiracy-mainstream-media-trump-farage-journalism/612628/

The Mainstream Media Won’t Tell You This

Helen Lewis
14-18 minutes

Photo Illustration by Adam Maida

It is strange to watch the creation of a new culture-war meme in real time. Talking directly to the camera from a fishing trawler, Nigel Farage takes a concerned and somber tone. The pro-Brexit politician says he has uncovered a huge scandal—migrant boats traveling from France to England, escorted into British waters by the French navy. He is worried for those on board: Once in Britain, they risk becoming “modern-day slave labor.” Gesturing offscreen, Farage adds: “You might as well have a big sign on the White Cliffs of Dover, over there, that says ‘Anyone that comes to Britain illegally can stay’ … We are being taken for a ride by everybody, including the French navy.”

Farage is a well-known figure in Britain, thanks to his leadership of the U.K. Independence Party, and then his own Brexit Party. Since Brexit was secured, he has reinvented himself as the closest thing Britain has to a Rush Limbaugh–style provocateur. His video has more than 250,000 views on YouTube, and has also been distributed to his 1.5 million Twitter followers and 974,000 Facebook followers. To put those figures in context, after years of decline and a precipitous drop caused by the coronavirus lockdown, no British newspaper now has a circulation as large as Farage’s Twitter following. Social media gives him the reach of a traditional media organization, but few of its obligations.

If you want to understand the conspiracist turn in modern politics, then Farage’s video series, shot during the pandemic, is a good place to start. His reports on migrant boats coming to Britain are filed on his YouTube channel under “Investigations” and are designed to look like traditional investigative journalism. They even adopt the tropes of British television-news reporting—the sad, falling intonation; the piece to camera; the languorous establishing shots of the sea.

Read: The prophecies of Q

They are, however, better seen as a dare: Unless media outlets repeat and amplify whatever he says, they are “sneering” and corrupt. Farage’s videos tell a simple story, with a victim—Britain, which is “being taken for a ride”—and a villain: not the migrants themselves, which might trigger accusations of racism, but France, a country typically presented in British folk mythology as arrogant and lazy. (Look at them with their short working weeks and their Gauloise-smoking intellectuals!)

What makes the series uniquely suited to this political era is the dash of gasoline he adds by suggesting that he is the only person brave and heretical enough to expose this hidden injustice. Three minutes into the trawler video, he says: “You do get the feeling this is a story that isn’t to be told. Well, you know what—today, we’re going to tell it.”

When journalism is hijacked by activists, a phrase like that is often invoked. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson: The louder someone talks about how “the mainstream media won’t cover this,” the faster you need to count your spoons. Nothing is so flimsy, so overspun, or so poorly sourced that it cannot be made to look like a scandal by conjuring the specter of a vast media conspiracy that’s repressing it. A story’s weakness becomes a strength: Other outlets’ refusal to follow up on it can be depicted as sinister. Viewers are seduced by the promise of access to hidden knowledge, which will ensure that they alone know what’s really going on. The best-rated comments on Farage’s trawler video give an idea of how his claims are being received. “This should be the lead story on the national news,” one states. “Anyone remember the BBC doing this with our money? Nah me neither,” another adds.

Of course, the BBC has reported on the migrant boats—at least seven times in the past month. Far from being a story that “isn’t to be told,” a parliamentary committee recently heard evidence on the issue, with testimony from a former head of Britain’s Border Force. The right-wing Telegraph and Daily Mail have both covered the story, as has the left-wing Guardian. The mainstream media’s treatment of the story does, in fairness, differ from Farage’s, largely by putting the actions into context: The French navy has a duty under maritime law to help boats in distress, and many migrants threaten to jump into the water if the vessel is boarded. The navy is then left with no option but to shadow the boats. (Also, although Channel crossings have risen, asylum applications in the U.K. have fallen since the start of the pandemic.)

None of this suits Farage’s simple, clean story of French treachery and immigrant invasion. The “migrant boats” are best thought of as what movie fans call a MacGuffin—a story element that drives the narrative, but whose actual nature is irrelevant, like Avatar’s unobtainium or the holy grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Here, the broader narrative is about British sovereignty, border security, and the alleged threat of immigration from Muslim-majority countries. Farage’s videos show him literally chasing after a boat—a classic use of a MacGuffin—but he doesn’t interview the migrants on board, attempt to tell their stories or uncover their motivations, or find out what happens after the Border Force intercepts them.

We could call this Potemkin journalism, after the villages consisting only of external facades designed to deceive outsiders. It looks like an investigation, but the conclusion is already determined, and any inconvenient facts are quickly airbrushed. And yet it gains gravitas and authority by copying the grammar of news reporting.

It’s tempting to say Potemkin journalism can flourish because trust in the media is so low. But that is only partly right. Farage is using the form of television reporting precisely because we recognize it, and instinctively believe it. Behind the external facade, though, there is nothing solid. Yet the mirrored hall of social media reflects the facade, over and over, making the illusion more convincing.

Read: The paranoid style in American entertainment

The political right saw the possibilities of appropriating journalistic forms to distribute content more than a decade ago. In 2009, an American conservative activist, James O’Keefe, and a friend filmed undercover at offices of the community organization ACORN, posing as a sex worker and a pimp asking for advice on how to run their illegal business. The videos were misleadingly edited: For example, O’Keefe appeared in stereotypical “pimp” clothes in the introductions, but wore business clothes when filming. The “investigation” would never have been published by traditional news organizations—most of which have clear rules about the use of subterfuge to obtain information—but superficially, it was damning enough to get ACORN shut down. (A report by the California attorney general, Edmund G. Brown, into the affected ACORN branches in its jurisdiction found that one receptionist “knew it to be a prank and made outrageous and false statements” and that O’Keefe and his associate “lied to engender compassion, but then edited their statements from the released videos.” He concluded that ACORN staff had acted inappropriately, but had not committed prosecutable crimes, adding: “Things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality. Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor.”) Organizations such as O’Keefe’s Project Veritas continue to use undercover filming today.

In Britain, this style has been adopted by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, a member of the British far right who framed his activism as a quest to uncover the hidden scandal of “Asian sex gangs.” In 2019, he was jailed for contempt of court after he live-streamed footage on Facebook of defendants in a child-grooming trial. Under English law, the case was subject to reporting restrictions, designed to prevent prejudicing juries in future linked trials. A court ruling later revealed that one of the defendants tried to appeal his conviction by citing Yaxley-Lennon’s actions. The activist nearly collapsed the trial, yet his conviction encouraged supporters to present him as “persecuted.”

Farage’s story has also been boosted by claims of martyrdom: After he made his first 100-mile round trip to film a video on migrant crossings in April, the police visited him at home to remind him of lockdown restrictions, which at that point forbade nonessential journeys. Farage claimed that he was a key worker: a journalist covering the pandemic. No further action was taken, and he was neither fined nor arrested.

In moments like that, or when he’s hosting his radio show or writing for The Telegraph, Farage is a journalist. When he’s attacking the “mainstream media,” he is not. The story he is reporting also exists simultaneously in two opposing states: One minute it is totally ignored; the next he is boasting about the “millions of people” who have viewed his work. All the power, none of the responsibility. (On June 11, his radio show was taken off air “with immediate effect.” The broadcaster, LBC, did not explain its decision beyond saying his contract had come to an end.)

Potemkin journalism has more in common with conspiracy theories than with traditional news reporting. It offers sweeping, totalizing narratives, without the complications and caveats that make many genuine investigations a chore to read. (Look at The New York Times initial reporting on sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein and see how focused and specific the allegations are, and how much space is allocated to rebuttal. Journalists can report only what they can prove to be true—and what they are confident they can demonstrate in court.)

As for MacGuffins, Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate is another example. For several months in his first term, American conservatives demanded to see it, claiming that it was being withheld to cover up the fact that Obama had been born in Kenya and thus was ineligible for the presidency. In 2011, the White House gave in and published the certificate, which confirmed Obama’s birth in Hawaii, hoping to end the suggestions that his government lacked legitimacy. Instead, the conversation moved on to the next “scandal.”

Adam Serwer: Birtherism of a nation

This conspiracy theory, “birtherism,” galvanized Donald Trump’s run for the White House, so it should be no surprise that he has embraced Potemkin journalism. “A lot of interest in this story about Psycho Joe Scarborough,” he tweeted on May 24 about the congressman turned TV host. “So a young marathon runner just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on his desk, & die? I would think there is a lot more to this story than that? An affair? What about the so-called investigator? Read story!” The link provided was to a site called True Pundit, which has a well-known modus operandi, perfected during the 2016 U.S. election: running baseless stories and then asking leading questions such as: “MSM Quiet on This One—Wonder Why?” (The pejorative use of MSM for “mainstream media” is another tell for activism posing as journalism.)

The husband of that “young marathon runner” begged Twitter to remove Trump’s tweet. Timothy Klausutis reiterated the facts: His wife, Lori, had an “undiagnosed heart condition, fell and hit her head on her desk at work.” However, just like the family of the Democratic staffer Seth Rich and the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook, Klausutis was faced with an impossible task. There is no standard of evidence that Trump, or his outriders, would accept to prove that Lori Klausutis died of natural causes. Trump is not interested in the answer, anyway; his tweets quickly moved on. The story was another MacGuffin. The “just asking questions” style of fake investigative journalism is designed to be undebunkable. It is the logic of psychosis: Any attempt to deny the existence of a conspiracy means that you must be in on it too.

One of Trump’s innovations in the genre of Potemkin journalism is to gamify it on a large scale. Those questions act as prompts—encouraging onlookers to join the hunt for the missing piece of the puzzle. Forums pore over “evidence” that contradicts the “official story.” Rather than being passive recipients of news doled out by elite gatekeepers, audiences can adopt the more flattering role of participants in a treasure hunt. For those caught up in such MacGuffin quests, the toll is high. The gamification of the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories led to one grieving father going into hiding, after his personal details were repeatedly distributed by a “truther.”

Perhaps it’s just the pandemic, but it’s easy to see these examples and think of viruses. Just as investigative journalism has evolved certain standards, tropes, and forms, so has its evil twin. Potemkin journalism exposes the weaknesses of the media. It exploits journalism’s porous boundary, to which there is no solution—it would be profoundly illiberal to license reporters. It exploits the caution necessary when running a news organization that can be sued by private individuals, or prosecuted under laws governing contempt of court or espionage. It exploits the fact that news judgments are inevitably subjective, and that the media are inarguably prone to groupthink.

Ellen Cushing: I was a teenage conspiracy theorist

It also satisfies a popular hunger for vivid tales of villains and victims, at the exact same time that the news industry is struggling financially and traditional, intensive, shoe-leather reporting is starting to feel like a luxury. At minimum, reporters need time—more time than internet commenters feel is reasonable—to “stand up” a complicated story. (Think of the clamor over The New York Times’ alleged slowness to report Tara Reade’s allegations against Joe Biden, then the comparative lack of interest in the nuanced, exhaustive article that it eventually produced on May 31 based on nearly 100 interviews.)

In our trustless, conspiracy-soaked age, it doesn’t matter that the case Stephen Yaxley-Lennon disrupted was eventually reported widely, once doing so did not endanger the integrity of other trials. It doesn’t matter that there is no evidence linking Joe Scarborough to his staffer’s death, or that no one with any serious knowledge of the case is pushing for it to be reopened. It doesn’t matter that the “hidden scandal” of the migrant boats has been covered by outlets across the political spectrum, and on Britain’s state broadcaster. These stories are not designed to lead to an outcome—an inquiry, a conviction, a change in policy. They exist to seed the internet with culture-war talking points. We live in a world of hollow facades.

Helen Lewis is a London-based staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights.

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www.theatlantic.com /technology/archive/2020/07/fake-pregnancy-celebrity-theories-benedict-cumberbacth-babygate/614089/

How a Fake Baby Is Born

Kaitlyn Tiffany
21-27 minutes

Art by Geoff Kim

“Why do some of these blogs refer to Benedict Cumberbatch’s children as … Pilo?” I ask, reading from a Tumblr post on my phone. On my first try, I pronounce it “peel-oh” and get a confused look in response, so I spell it out instead.

“Oh, pillow,” Patty laughs, once she realizes what I’m looking at. “That’s our joke. We call them Pillow One, Two, and Three.” She laughs again. Then she blushes, as she does each time something cracks her up but doesn’t register with me as funny. I first knew Patty as “Gatorfisch,” her username since 2013 on Tumblr, where she goes for photos of cute animals and discussions of liberal politics, among other things. She is 49, and has a 15-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old grandson. Her husband, she wrote to me a few days before we met in person, would not be allowing me to come into their home, in case I hacked his computer. (“Nothing personal,” she assured me—he deals with highly sensitive information at his job.)

So I’m sitting in a coffee shop near her house in Reno, Nevada, just a few days before the coronavirus started closing businesses like these. And I’m asking her this question because, for the past five years, Patty has been one of the most prolific and well-known Tumblr bloggers making the case that Benedict Cumberbatch’s wife, Sophie Hunter, is a criminal, who has been blackmailing him for years to stay in a sham marriage.

Patty works in the operations department of a mortgage company, but she hasn’t updated her LinkedIn page in years, because she doesn’t want people on Tumblr contacting her current employer. (I granted her request to use only her first name in this piece because, in the past, she’s received a threatening letter at her home address, and she says her personal information has been published online repeatedly.) Having spent her youth living in several southern states before moving to Nevada 20 years ago, she has a sugar-water southern accent that soaks normal conversation with charm but makes caustic accusations sound even more ominous. Such as when she tells me that she spotted cocaine stains on Hunter’s jumpsuit in a photo taken days after she “supposedly” gave birth, at a party for the opening of an Annie Leibovitz exhibition.

“Even if it’s only on Tumblr, I want her to know that she’s not getting away with it,” she says warmly, as if sharing a family recipe. “I want her to know that somebody knows what she’s doing.”

Hunter and Cumberbatch’s first son was born in June 2015. This was just two months before One Direction member Louis Tomlinson announced that he would be having a baby with a former fling, Briana Jungwirth—a child that has also been declared “fake” by bloggers on Tumblr, some of whom still reject the idea that he is Tomlinson’s real child, even now that he is 4 years old. Before then, in 2011, the heady early years of social media produced the theory that Beyoncé faked being pregnant with Blue Ivy to cover up use of a surrogate; the same speculation dogged Kim Kardashian’s second pregnancy in 2015. (Through her publicist, Beyoncé called those rumors “stupid, ridiculous and false.” Kardashian addressed the rumors about her on Instagram, with a naked photo of her pregnant body.) More recently, conspiracy theorists have decided that Meghan Markle faked the birth of her son, Archie. Many of them refer to him as “Darren,” a reference to a model of hyper-realistic baby doll that could be used in photo ops in place of a real baby. “People are not stupid,” one wrote on Twitter in January. “She is sick!!”

The primary evidence for these claims is usually a blurry photo or two in which a baby bump appears “deflated” or “shifted.” A visible wrinkle in a shirt can be deemed evidence of a prosthetic. An expecting mother who disappears from the public eye during her pregnancy can easily be accused of hiding something. Many of the images that purport to reveal the truth are doctored or taken at a strange angle, but can be convincing enough if you’re looking quickly and looking to believe. In the case of Hunter’s first pregnancy, amateur sleuths doodled over images of her in a bikini on vacation, making the case that her bump was, somehow, upside down.

One of the most influential voices in celebrity gossip is a blogger and entertainment lawyer who goes by the pen name Enty. Since 2006, he has been running the website Crazy Days and Nights, serving a devout audience who email him tips every day, and frustrating publicists who know it can be more dangerous to refute a story than to ignore it.

“I don’t like hypocrites. People magazine and TMZ are owned by film studios, record labels. They have an agenda; they’re giving you a sanitized view of celebrity,” Enty tells me. “They call it gossip, but we know what gossip really is. That’s the thing that keeps me obsessed and the thing that makes me want to keep writing—looking for these holes.”

He goes down the list for me. It’s “pretty obvious” that Beyoncé used a surrogate with Blue Ivy. It’s “pretty obvious” that Tomlinson didn’t write the tweet announcing the birth of his son, so who did? Liam Payne, another former member of One Direction, may or may not be the father of the singer Cheryl’s baby (“Cheryl is just a master of fake relationships; I never really trust anything that she does. But there’s not enough interest for me to dig around in Cheryl’s life and find out.”)  Markle was “cradling a baby bump when she was supposedly less than two months pregnant, and it just didn’t make any sense.” And then, Hunter. No opinion on the first two kids, but “there’s supposedly this third kid named Finn, born in 2019, and nobody has ever seen the child.” (Although media outlets reported in 2018 that Hunter and Cumberbatch were expecting their third child, the couple haven’t confirmed it publicly, and they are known for being extremely private.)

A gossip site is not what we would typically call a dark corner of the internet, but a deliberately concocted air of mystery surrounds Enty and his “sources,” not unlike the one that surrounds, say, QAnon. His podcast, which comes out with at least 20 episodes a month, is paywalled on Patreon and advertised with a warning: “Welcome to my world. Enter at your own risk.”

In the summer of 2014, the year after Patty joined Tumblr, Cumberbatch and Hunter were spotted together for the first time. By November they were engaged. The Cumberbatch fandom was in chaos.

“Tumblr blew up. You couldn’t not see stuff about it,” Patty says. Some fans were thrilled by the whirlwind romance, but others doubted it could be anything other than a PR stunt, and combed the internet for evidence. They reblogged GIFs of Hunter seemingly stomping out of rooms or scowling at her fiancé, and they raised alarm bells about Hunter fan blogs that seemed to spring up overnight.  

After Hunter revealed a baby bump at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in January 2015, Cumberbatch fans quickly pointed out that the two had arrived separately, and latched onto video frames in which it seemed as though he was surprised to see the bump. “The look on his face... And the look on her face. I was like, Uh-oh. I was like, Oh, somebody’s trying to trap him.” At that point, she says, she didn’t think Weinstein was behind it anymore. Hunter, she believed, had gone rogue. “That’s when I stopped just being a bystander and started making posts.”

Patty’s following grew to just over 1,000, and “sources” began approaching her each time information was lacking. “Every time I start to question it, one of my sources comes to me or something happens and it kind of drags me back in,” she says. “I just kind of fell down the rabbit hole and haven’t really come out of it yet totally.”

Not everyone who blogs about the imagined misdeeds of Sophie Hunter imagines those misdeeds to be the same. Among the self-named “skeptics” are those who believe that Hunter and Cumberbatch’s marriage is a PR stunt gone wrong, or merely classically unhappy, but that all of the children are real. There are those who believe that one or two of the children are real and the others aren’t. There are those, like Patty, who believe Hunter to be guilty of various felonies and cinematic criminal conspiracies. (To be clear, there is no evidence to support any of these claims about Hunter’s marriage, pregnancies, or supposed criminal activity. Representatives for Hunter and Cumberbatch declined to respond to multiple requests for comment.)

“There’s word on the street she was an escort at one point, and might still be escorting,” Patty says, adding that she’s also been told that in the beginning of their relationship, Hunter kept Cumberbatch hooked on drugs to control him. Patty believes she knows Hunter’s IP address, and says she tracked it flying to Osaka, Japan, for a day, then flying right back. “I was talking to one of my sources, and I was told she’s also in with some really nasty people who are in with human trafficking,” she says, by way of explaining the purpose for this supposed trip. “And that’s how I put it. I didn’t necessarily say she was a human trafficker, but she was hanging out with people who were part of a human-trafficking network. And I showed that. I said, Make of it what you will.”

Though the pop-culture image of a conspiracy theorist is a man in his mother’s basement, or an Alex Jones devotee typing himself into a sweat on Reddit, women have always had their own remarkable and terrifying ideas about how the world may secretly work.

As the political scientist Michael Barkun explains in his 2003 book, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, it’s possible that hardly anyone in the United States would ever have heard of the Illuminati had it not been for the efforts of the British conspiracy theorist Nesta Webster, a foremother of American conspiracism. She wrote extensively about the Illuminati’s efforts to create a Communist world government led by a Jewish cabal, and also blamed the group for World War I. Barkun’s book credits her and another female conspiracy theorist, Edith Starr Miller, with “the concept of a kind of interlocking directorate of conspirators who operate through a network of secret societies,” which has since informed decades of American conspiracy theories.

“There hasn’t been much focused study on women and conspiracy-theory belief,” says Erin Kempker, a history professor at the Mississippi University for Women and the author of Big Sister: Feminism, Conservatism, and Conspiracy in the Heartland. “I think there is a perception that it’s a largely male world. I didn’t find that to be the case.”

Kempker’s book focuses on the second wave of feminism in the Midwest in the 1970s, which conservative women insisted, partly successfully, was part of a conspiracy to create a one-world government, homogenize the sexes, and eradicate Christian family life. “What I found were women absolutely immersed in a conspiratorial worldview,” she says. “They had newsletters where they shared conspiratorial ideas with one another. They had book lists. They would write articles. These were women’s organizations. I would say we need to rethink the stereotype. Women are definitely capable of creating conspiracy theories and spreading conspiracy theories and believing conspiracy theories. I don’t think there’s a gender divide on this.”

The difference between theories about famous women and their babies and theories about supposed political conspiracies isn’t form or sentiment, it’s proper nouns. Some bloggers on Tumblr refer to believers in the fake-baby theories as “birthers,” with the aim of invoking all the dangerous disavowal of truth that word implies. Though the women Kempker studied feared government intervention, not manipulation by Hollywood stars, the basic pattern holds: Conspiracism of all kinds is about identifying a powerful cabal and creating a narrative around it as a means of grasping some kind of control over the mysterious events of the world.

And it’s often about anger, too. Modern theories about “fake” celebrity babies come with a cocktail of resentment toward the hypocrisy of celebrity, the dishonesty of the media, and the unflappable confidence of the elite, who get away with whatever they want. “Cheryl will literally milk this until we all turn to dust,” a One Direction fan who believes that Liam Payne’s son is not really his wrote on Tumblr. “Unless I was suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning or had a head wound, I wouldn’t believe Cherliam was a real relationship.”

Self-identified "skeptics" of Cumberbatch’s marriage call the fans who defend Hunter “nannies”—because of the way they coddle him—and the six most powerful nannies “übers.” Patty also calls them stalkers, and says they’re the type to collect Cumberbatch’s “snotty tissues” and fantasize about being in love with him. (Romantic interest does not play into Patty’s personal fascination.) According to Patty, the “nannies” have threatened to tell her employer about her online activity, and suggested that she kill herself. She shows me a few anonymous messages, and then she shows me another that she believes is from Hunter herself. (It is very obviously not.)

Patty sees her work as fundamentally humanitarian: She believes that by identifying Hunter as a “narcissist,” she’s helping other people see that they’ve been manipulated. She’s known narcissistic women throughout her life, she says, including a college roommate and a former co-worker, as well as her brother’s ex-wife, who she claims left him penniless, and her father’s ex-wife, who she says tried to murder him.

“Anytime I do think maybe I will stop, the bullying starts again and I’m like, You know what, nah, I’m going to still be here to be a thorn in their side,” she tells me. “I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me and say, Oh my gosh, because of you bringing all this to our attention and commentary of what we’re seeing in these photos, it made me realize that I have that person in my life too. Or I’ve always felt like I was losing my mind and now I know I’m not.”

Though Cumberbatch himself has been clear that he hates what people on the internet are saying about his family, Patty has been undeterred. He’s obviously not happy with her, she says, but information still gets out. It’s almost as though he’s dog-whistling, and letting people know it’s okay to bring things to her. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he just ignore it? (As with most conspiracy theories, everything is part of the narrative—even things that would seem to disprove the narrative.)

She isn’t sure that he has personally read her blog, but she thinks a couple of his friends probably have, and she’s “99.999 percent” sure that Hunter has. The Department of Justice has as well, according to another of her IP address lookups. This is the kind of attention that comes with special work, as one of the few who can understand and is willing to expose the secret machinations of the elite—though Patty also expresses some humility and says she’s mostly a mouthpiece for other people’s research and information. She has the temperament to put up with harassment; not everyone does. She does it for them.

“I was told by two different people that they heard [Hunter] say things to [Cumberbatch] that made them want to hit her, because it was just so horrible,” Patty tells me, when I ask if there is evidence that Hunter is abusive.

She returns to it later, saying that one of those people was a friend of Cumberbatch’s who wanted to punch Hunter, even though he’d never wanted to punch a woman before. Though she brings up the idea of violence against Hunter, she never expressly advocates it. But it’s not only Hunter—telling a story about a former co-worker, she says, “When she’d walk out of the room, people would go, I just want to grab her by the head and just slam her up against the wall.”

When I ask her if any of this sounds misogynistic to her, she says no. She identifies as a feminist. To her, it’s Hunter who is “setting women’s rights back [and] making everybody look bad.”

This is the thread that ties Tumblr conspiracy blogs to the dominant conversation of the broader internet—in the age of Instagram artifice and personal brands and image above all else, what do we spend more time doing than policing the self-presentation of women?

The internet didn’t invent conspiracism, but it did make spreading conspiracy theories easier and more fun. “You’ve got a lot of crackpots contacting you saying they’ve got inside information,” says Ted Casablanca, who wrote for E! News for nearly two decades. “You didn’t have to take the time to make a phone call or write a letter. You just pushed a button. And you know, it created a frenzy.” The tips he started receiving after the rise of social media were much weirder than before, he says, but not only that. “More sanctimonious. Much more She’s doing this and she’s wrong, or She’s doing this and I hate her.”

These conversations happen all over the internet, but Tumblr is a particularly serviceable platform for intricate, “evidence-based” theorizing because of its nesting-doll reblog structure, which allows groups of bloggers to build on one another’s work layer by layer in rapid succession. It’s also insular—far more difficult to search than Twitter, less immediately comprehensible to outsiders than even Reddit. Users are allowed to identify by pseudonym, they are allowed to change that pseudonym whenever they like, and they are allowed to have multiple identities at once. This facilitates all kinds of expression, a lot of which is beneficial to society—the platform became a cultural force because it created a secluded place for LGBTQ communities and young people of color. But these can also be the conditions for gossip and suspicion—what spirals out from them is impossible to hold anyone in particular accountable for.

Before social media, it was also less possible to “prove” a celebrity conspiracy. An early example of the practice of ordinary people gathering “evidence” and publishing it online occurred within the Lord of the Rings fandom in the early aughts, which used screenshots from behind-the-scenes DVDs and easily accessible paparazzi photography to make the case on LiveJournal that various combinations of co-stars were in love. Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan, in particular, followed by Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom. These theories were often teased by gossip columnists like Casablanca, who wrote at the time, “You’ve heard the stories, right? All that ferocious frolicking those Lord of the Rings riders have been getting up to?”

In 2014, a Lancaster University doctoral student, Anna Martin, wrote about these stories as “star texts,” and described their allure: “Star texts allow for fantasies not only of wealth and leisure, but of a life in which love is the only concern.” To her, the switch point at which a fan-fiction writer strives to transform into a documentarian was far more intriguing than the stories themselves. The Lord of the Rings shipping community pushed over the line of fantasy and into “proof” because of the wealth of information and imagery the internet made possible. The entertainment industry’s embrace of behind-the-scenes extras; elaborate, fan-focused marketing campaigns; and expansive franchises with “universes” of their own—which happened alongside the rise of social media and a new golden age of celebrity gossip—“produced audiences who are primed to follow complex storylines across different delivery platforms, and who are familiar with narrative deliveries that require them to do the work of piecing storylines together.”

Tumblr “masterposts” and “archives” also lend projects like these a feeling of gravitas and scholarship. Conspiracy theories here, as everywhere, tend to interlock, and Patty has a passing interest in Markle only because she believes she and Hunter share nefarious connections through the elite club Soho House. Another major Hunter-skeptic blogger who goes by Aeltrileaf writes about Markle often, and refers to her as “Maggot.” She posts about political conspiracies as well, including QAnon, which Patty doesn’t agree with but defends, saying that Aeltrileaf’s family is from Mexico and has good reason to mistrust the United States government.

This is a nonsensical point, but there is some truth to the idea that even the worst conspiracy theories say something about the systems of power and the moment in time they emerge from. The faux-feminist language around hating Hunter not because she is a woman but because women should be criticized as freely as men seems clearly born of a culture and media environment that have a perverse idea of what it would mean to take women seriously, and still struggle to discuss them without dissecting, primarily, their status as wives and girlfriends and mothers.

“The women I researched would certainly never agree that they were misogynist, or that they were anti-women in attacking,” Kempker says. “They would say it’s these women who give other women a bad name. And there’s an idea that they have to be deployed to handle other women, because they see the truth. You can snow these other people who don’t know your game, but you won’t pull that over on me.”

The manipulative celebrity is, in fact, the only category of conspiracy theory Patty is interested in. She takes care to draw lines around what is appropriate to speculate about and what isn’t. She finds it preposterous that Michael Sheen’s relationship is a sham, or that Keanu Reeves’s is. It’s dangerous to suggest that the coronavirus was created just to take out a global pedophile ring, and it’s dangerous to say that Hillary Clinton eats babies, or that Meryl Streep is the high priestess in a Satanic cult. It’s dangerous to say that the U.S. government orchestrated 9/11, or that vaccines cause autism. But still, it’s her responsibility to talk about Hunter, because no one else will. Journalists who have tried in the past have been threatened into silence, she says. Everyone is scared.

“I’m actually kind of surprised that you haven’t been already contacted or told to drop this, to be honest,” she tells me as I get ready to leave. I remind her that I’m not going to prove that Hunter has done any of the things that she claims, and she nods. “I get it. I completely and utterly get it. We don’t have the proof to truly out—Oh, there’s no kid—and I get that.” Then she continues. “But I think there’s enough out there to show why we’re questioning it.”

Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers technology.

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www.theatlantic.com /technology/archive/2020/08/how-instagram-aesthetics-repackage-qanon/615364/

The Women Making Conspiracy Theories Beautiful

Kaitlyn Tiffany
17-21 minutes

Illustrations by Charlotte Fos

A blush-colored square filled with the all-caps advice SHOW UP EVERY DAY FOR SOMETHING YOU BELIEVE IN belongs to one of the least remarkable categories of Instagram content: visually unchallenging, impossible to disagree with, pink. Even if people do not exactly know how to show up every day for something they believe in—particularly during a pandemic—the basic spirit of the message is blandly uplifting for a millisecond during a bleary-eyed morning scroll through the feed: Today, I will, in some way, demonstrate that I believe in something, somehow! Hardly anything about it would dissuade the casual follower from double-tapping her appreciation before moving on.

But this particular image, posted in March by the Utah-based fashion, beauty, and parenting influencer Jalynn Schroeder to more than 50,000 followers, is accompanied by a series of hashtags that includes the initialism WWG1WGA—“Where we go one, we go all”—a motto used by adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory. QAnon is flexible and convoluted, but generally posits that President Donald Trump is locked in a battle with the “deep state,” and is attempting to bring down a ring of pedophiles and child traffickers that counts various high-profile politicians and celebrities as co-conspirators. Most famously, it’s the evolution of Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that motivated a man to storm into a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant with an AR-15 in December 2016, bent on exposing a supposed pedophilia ring in its basement, which did not exist.

When Schroeder’s feed nods to Q, it does so subtly, mostly in her stories and captions. On the grid, she posts photos of her manicures, her graphic tees, her favorite gummy vitamins, and the mommy-and-me sundresses she and her young daughter wear. She is also candid about mental health and the effects that giving birth can have on the body; recently, her followers have watched her prepare for and undergo surgery to correct an abdominal separation.

Schroeder initially responded to a request for an interview, but did not respond to further emails about scheduling it. I learned about her conversion to the QAnon cause via a 14-minute video she posted in March. It begins with the Maya Angelou quote “We are only as blind as we want to be,” written in funky orange and teal fonts. Wearing her curly purple hair in a cheetah-print headband, eyes made wider with electric-blue makeup, she then recounts watching an Instagram video sent to her by a friend, which she initially dismissed as “crazy”—but something was bothering her, and as the weeks went on, she decided to start her own research into QAnon and the global child-trafficking ring it seeks to expose. “I’m a mama of two, I have a lot of mamas following me, and this stuff has been very, very, very hard for me to digest,” she says. But she’s grateful she’s been led to the truth. “I’ve never felt more peace.”

The comments on this video are strikingly similar to those that appear on her regular posts: “So true,” with three heart emoji; “Proud of you for using your platform,” with three sets of clapping hands. In the caption, she links to a tutorial for mimicking her makeup.

In June, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance published a cover story on the rise of QAnon, writing that it had “made its way onto every major social and commercial platform and any number of fringe sites.” Instagram, famous for aspiration and tranquil luxury, has become a home for paranoid thinking just like everywhere else online: Influencers are mixing virulent distrust of the media and religious gratitude toward QAnon with sponsored posts for cool-girl clothing brands and beauty products. Many seem to be drawn in at first by concerns about child trafficking—a real and fairly noncontroversial problem that looks much different in practice than in the Q imagination, which has weaponized it. In July, a wild claim—that the furniture-retail site Wayfair was serving as a middleman for the child-trafficking ring that captivates QAnon devotees—took off, in particular among Instagram influencers whose accounts trade in the domestic and in the joys of consumer culture.

The anonymous Instagram account @little.miss.patriot shared its first post on June 29—about the supposed references to QAnon in the music video for Justin Bieber’s song “Yummy”—and went from 50,000 followers in early July to 266,000 by the time of this writing. Each of the posts from the self-proclaimed “truth seeker” and “digital soldier” uses a pastel-and-mustard color palette drawn from the past five years of Millennial-oriented direct-to-consumer beauty-brand marketing, sometimes accented with glitter or watercolor flourishes. The text on these backgrounds unfurls complicated conspiracy theories about Chrissy Teigen, Tom Hanks, Taylor Swift, and John F. Kennedy. “The deep state is evil and Satanic,” read white letters on soft pink and teal. “They are the ones controlling the media. it involves celebrities, too. the deep state is responsible for the trafficking of children & putting them into sex slavery. they torture these children & use their blood for a drug they all feast on, called adrenochrome. LOOK IT UP IF YOU DON’T KNOW.” In the comments, an influencer who designs children’s birthday parties shouts, “AMEN SIS.” Her grid is full of peach-tinted family photos and remodeled bedrooms, and Story Highlights are labeled “pregnancy,” “play,” “design,” “playroom,” and then “woke”—pink slides dotted with stars, detailing the way the media have ignored a “global elite pedophile ring” in favor of covering the pandemic.

Instagram has long been a place where what you see might be smoke and mirrors—a home for the best and most beautiful version of everyday life, put on display for consumption and then expensive imitation. What is startling about QAnon’s new presence there is the way it slips in: easily, and with little visible pushback from the influencers’ communities or from the platform that hosts them. We’re used to conspiracy theories appearing on the internet’s strange and ugly spaces, laid out with blurry photos and eyesore annotations. But those visual cues are missing this time. There’s no warning—just a warm, glamorous facade, and then the rabbit hole.

In the course of reporting this story, I contacted a dozen of the women posting about QAnon or related conspiracy theories on their accounts, as well as more than 60 of the women who had commented on their posts in support (with hearts, prayer hands, or emphatic thank-yous), many of whom had followings of their own in the tens of thousands. Very few responded, and most of those who did were hostile, stating that the use of their name or photos in a story was grounds for a lawsuit, or expressing a deep disdain for and distrust of the media—a core tenet of the QAnon belief system, as well as a somewhat common feeling among internet personalities who have successfully created their own large platforms.

Those who did agree to answer questions were concerned about child trafficking, but didn’t have extensive knowledge of QAnon, or seemed unaware that the people they were following were its proponents. Lana Michele, a Florida-based fashion and parenting influencer with 84,000 followers, agreed to speak briefly with me. Michele doesn’t post about QAnon, but she’d commented in support of a post about child trafficking that was shared by a woman who has a QAnon hashtag in her Instagram bio. “We are all just ‘waking up,’” Michele told me, adding that she’s been following conversations about child trafficking on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. “It is literally everywhere right now … and everyone needs to be aware, in my opinion.” She isn’t worried about the involvement of QAnon followers in the conversation. Any help in spreading the message is good help. “I find it useful,” she said.

Claire Thibault, an aspiring lifestyle blogger from North Carolina, had commented on the same post. “I’ve read and seen things about child trafficking only recently, and it’s disturbed me enough that I believe it should be mentioned more in the media,” she told me, saying that she first heard about the issue via fashion and lifestyle influencers. She cited as her primary information sources three Instagram accounts, one of which shares conspiracy theories almost exclusively and posts regularly about QAnon and Pizzagate. When I asked how she felt about those subjects, she said, “I honestly don’t know anything about either of those.”

Read: Instagram is the internet’s new home for hate

Two others told me that even though they themselves don’t believe in Q, they believe in the right to express oneself online. Ashley Houston, a mom from California who gained most of her 23,000 followers after she started making elegant pastel infographics about child trafficking, has never commented on QAnon or any other conspiracy theories—she prefers primary sources and clear, verifiable facts. Still, she’s friendly with some women who do post about those topics. “It’s okay for their focus to be on what they think is important,” she said. Michelle Merenda, a New Jersey–based parenting and mental-health blogger with 11,000 followers, told me she finds most of her information about child trafficking through hashtags. She listed several mainstream tags, including #saveourchildren, then added, “I do go to #QAnon, also #pedogate, #Pizzagate. And I know a lot of those things are conspiracy theories, but … there’s a lot of [questions posted there] that I would consider something that I would ask, and would kind of want to look into.”

Though Facebook, which owns Instagram, removed some QAnon-related content in May, conspiracism is still flourishing on the platform, largely untouched—especially in private QAnon groups, whose total membership is reportedly in the millions—despite more substantial recent actions from other social-media giants such as Twitter and TikTok. (Reddit is further ahead than all of them, having implemented a blanket ban against QAnon nearly two years ago.)

Instagram offers two main pathways for discovering QAnon, and neither has been slowed down in any way. The first is the hashtag search, which makes millions of posts about QAnon incredibly easy to access in one convenient feed. The second is the recommendations algorithm, which pushes followers from one account to the next, linking accounts that post similar content and have similar sets of followers. Reached for comment, an Instagram spokesperson said, “We are constantly reviewing our policies to ensure they reflect the latest in online behaviors, and to make sure we are keeping people safe on Instagram.”

However Facebook decides to do that, it’s clear that QAnon isn’t just hovering on the edges of Instagram—it’s increasingly part of the platform’s mainstream culture. Its supporters are so enthusiastic, and so active online, that their participation levels resemble stan Twitter more than they do any typical political movement. QAnon has its own merch, its own microcelebrities, and a spirit of digital evangelism that requires constant posting. One QAnon Instagram account I followed for this article gained 20,000 followers over three days in July. Nearly 2 million Instagram posts include the hashtag #WWG1WGA, and more than 800,000 are accompanied by the related tag #TheGreatAwakening. A recent post from the influencer Maddie Thompson uses the latter, along with the QAnon tag #painiscoming. The comments are full of hearts, kissy-face emoji, and gushing compliments: “Love that pure heart of yours!!” QAnon’s digital community represents something like a “social-media cheat code” for up-and-coming influencers, says Travis View, who has been documenting the rise of QAnon for the past two years on his podcast, QAnon Anonymous. “There is a large population of QAnon followers who will adore basically anyone who will acknowledge them or cater to their views in any way.”

Doing so is also less risky than it might have been a few years ago. Though Instagram influencers in the lifestyle and parenting spaces used to steer clear of politics and contentious social issues, appealing instead to the broadest audience possible, trends have shifted in the past few years toward more “authentic” content—open discussion about the challenges of motherhood, the strangeness of existing in a body, the right to speak one’s mind. For the many influencers who have spent years building intimate relationships with their audience, all this candor has served to make these bonds only tighter. And if followers can trust these women on domestic matters of interior design and party planning and postpartum depression and family emergency, maybe they can trust them on darker, more political issues as well.

Read: How a fake baby is born

When I showed some of these Instagram accounts to Sophie Bishop, a lecturer in digital humanities at King’s College London, she identified in all of them a “very recognizable,” feminine-coded aesthetic. “It’s aspirational, and then it’s also authentic enough to allow for relatability,” she told me. All kinds of influencers strive to make that sort of impression, but it can also help launder disinformation and dangerous ideas:  “The original function of influencers was to be more relatable than mainstream media,” Bishop said. “They’re supposed to be presenting something that’s more authentic or more trustworthy or more embedded in reality.”

Taylor Lorenz wrote for The Atlantic early last year that Instagram is “likely where the next great battle against misinformation will be fought, and yet it has largely escaped scrutiny.” One of the most obvious explanations for that lapse is that Instagram—more than any other major social platform—shows each of its users exactly what they want to see. It’s a habitual, ritualistic space where people (like me) go for examples of how to be happy and well liked; it’s also where we take the chaos of our daily existence and push it into a simple, pleasing form we think other people will appreciate.

Read: The coronavirus conspiracy boom

Time spent there is reciprocal, a never-ending exchange of sweet words and the heart icons that are the only possible way to instantly respond to a piece of content on the platform. Instagram is women’s work, as it demands skills they’ve historically been compelled to excel at: presenting as lovely, presenting as desirable, presenting as good, safe, nonthreatening. All of which, of course, are valuable appearances for a dangerous conspiracy theory to have. Ironically, following many of the QAnon hobbyists will lead to a suggestion from Instagram that you follow Chrissy Teigen, one of QAnon’s designated villains, who also happens to have created a brand based on a desirable domestic life. The platform itself is operating on its interpretation of beautiful surfaces, and far less so on what the people producing them are saying.

“It’s a huge misconception that disinformation and conspiracy theorizing happens only in fringe spaces, or dark corners of the internet,” Becca Lewis, a Stanford doctoral student specializing in online political subcultures, told me. “We say you ‘fall down a rabbit hole.’ But it’s not how the ecosystem actually works. So much of this content is being disseminated by super popular accounts with absolutely mainstream aesthetics.”

Previously, Lewis had studied white-supremacist internet personalities who use similar tactics. She found that they would make Instagram accounts completely free of extremist rhetoric, and dedicated instead to dreamy engagement photos and romantic vacations. Then they’d draw followers over to YouTube, where they would tell personal stories—particularly difficult to fact-check, always prefaced with a polite “Do your own research”—about how they’d come to believe in various white-nationalist, far-right causes, and conspiracy theories. She thinks what’s happening on Instagram looks similar.

“If you’re able to make this covetable, beautiful aesthetic and then attach these conspiracy theories to it, that normalizes the conspiracy theories in a very specific way that Instagram is particularly good for,” Lewis said. Of course, she added, it’s hard to say what’s orchestrated and what’s genuine on Instagram. But the effect is the same, whether or not it’s deliberate.

One account I followed in the course of reporting this story startled me more than the others. It looked like something I would stumble across and follow organically on any ordinary day, lost in the never-ending rush of images of the enviable lives of other people. @indyblue_ has an affiliate link to Rihanna’s lingerie line in her bio and seems to spend her days on the edges of mountain lakes or biking through the desert with her bleach-blonde husband, eating berries, wearing clothes she designed herself that read I LOVE YOU SAY IT BACK.

In her Instagram stories, she writes about the media “gaslighting” women by referring to conspiracy theories as what they are. When I messaged her for this story, she responded, asking, “Do you think I’m dumb[,] stupid[,] or dumb.”

If anything, I felt like an idiot. An aesthetic that appeals to me personally was being used to mask something that it’s my job to pluck out and pin to the wall: It made me shiver. My years using Instagram as a guide for how to look and how to live have trained me to see cool clothes and well-constructed personal brands as signifiers of something intrinsically good. I’ve curated my feed by hand; the thousands of images I look at each day are ones I have in some way chosen. They’re as much of who I am as any bulleted list of my dreams or desires would be. Why wouldn’t I trust them?

Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers technology.

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www.theatlantic.com /politics/archive/2020/08/conspiracy-theory-rule-them-all/615550/

The Conspiracy Theory to Rule Them All

Steven J. Zipperstein
8-10 minutes

Photography by Tereza Zelenkova

The modern world’s most consequential conspiracy text was barely noticed when it first appeared in a little-read Russian newspaper in 1903. The message of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is straightforward, and terrifying: The rise of liberalism had provided Jews with the tools to destroy institutions—the nobility, the church, the sanctity of marriage—whole. Soon, they would take control of the world, as part of a revenge plot dating back to the ascendancy of Christendom. The text, ostensibly narrated by a Jewish leader, describes this plan in detail, relying on centuries-old anti-Jewish tropes, and including lengthy expositions on monetary, media, and electoral manipulation. It announces Jewry’s triumph as imminent: The world order will fall into the hands of a cunning elite, who have schemed forever and are now fated to rule until the end of time.

It was a fabrication, and a clumsy one, largely copied from the obscure, French-language political satire Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, or The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, by Maurice Joly. But it has enjoyed a remarkable appeal, despite various attempts to ban it and calls for individuals to denounce it—and now, in our conspiracy-saturated moment, it has decisively reemerged.

The book sells widely in Turkey, Syria, and Japan; remains a staple of Russian Orthodox bookshops; and in 2002, was the subject of a long-running Egyptian television series. It is widely available on eBay and on the Barnes & Noble website. The British charity Oxfam sold it on its site until March of this year. When asked by The New York Times in 2018 to name the books at her bedside, Alice Walker listed David Icke’s And the Truth Will Set You Free, a contemporary summary of The Protocols. At a 2019 congressional hearing, the former National Security Council official Fiona Hill described The Protocols’ image of a greedy, devious Jew as “the longest-running anti-Semitic trope we have.” Last week, when an automated Twitter bot managed by the FBI posted a 139-page file containing the text and the agency’s documents on it, hate-filled praise streamed in alongside the replies condemning the tweet for its lack of context. For devotees, The Protocols’ capacity to explain the world remains so resonant that the COVID-19 pandemic has now been blamed on the machinations of the ubiquitous Jewish elders.

A mountain of writings has surfaced over the past century and more, each devoted to revealing the supposed perfidy of the Jews. But nearly all have disappeared: The back shelves of research libraries are packed with anti-Semitic best sellers now turned to dust. (Who still reads Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, a massive best seller celebrated by George Bernard Shaw at the time of its publication in 1899 as a “masterpiece”?) Even Hitler’s Mein Kampf is rarely cited, though it remains a favorite of the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan and in a newly energized far right.  

Jemele Hill: The anti-Semitism we didn’t see

But The Protocols has survived, more so than any other text of its kind. It has done so not because its ideas are particularly original, and certainly not because they’re correct. It has done so for the simple reason that The Protocols is, curiously enough, a compelling read. Conspiracy theories are many things, but most of all, they’re narratives—understandable, comprehensive stories about how the world works, complete with the arcs and the rhythms of any other epic tale of heroes and villains. Part of what makes certain ones endure is how well they unfurl that story.

The Protocols’ voice is cool, patronizing, vile; the voice of someone who is ready to perform any task, however dastardly, in the march toward world domination. This, then, is no secondary source, unlike other familiar, formulaic expressions of anti-Semitism, but a chance to overhear a consequential Jewish leader plotting the fate of the world. This narrative immediacy is the difference between a newspaper article and a novel, between remove and urgency. The Protocols is not, purportedly, mere narration of a diabolical plot—it’s evidence of one. It projects authority by obscuring its authorship, not unlike various religious texts—or, to use a much more recent and pertinent example, the anonymous dispatches that form the foundation of QAnon.

And beneath its wild, hate-filled surface, The Protocols has a surprisingly solid, if plagiarized, core. Joly’s source material is an astute portrait of modernity’s ills, imagining a collision between (the well-meaning, but inadequate) Montesquieu and (the brilliant, immeasurably more persuasive) Machiavelli, and ultimately reveals the susceptibility of liberal society to manipulation and distraction using war, or greed, or the clouds of nostalgia. It was a prescient view of the world, as the political theorist Hans Speier has said, one that perceived “the hazards of popular sovereignty as well as the abuse of power by social engineers.” Nearly everything about The Protocols is wrong, but just enough about its depiction of the onset of totalitarianism is insightful that it is harder to dismiss than other, more outlandish conspiracy theories.

And though its most fervent following is on the far right, the text itself is without any emphatic leftist or rightist coloring. This is why it can be embraced as it is today by disparate groups such as evangelicals, neo-Nazis, some anti-Israel activists, and a slice of black-metal fans. It is endlessly versatile, a Rorschach test onto which a great assortment of convictions can readily be sketched.

Perhaps the finest of all scholars writing today about The Protocols is Michael Hagemeister, a mild, left-leaning German based at the Ruhr University in Bochum. His entry into the study of this text provides a useful look at its rapid move in recent years from obscurity at the far fringe of political life to something close to the mainstream.

Hagemeister was introduced to The Protocols when he was visiting the Soviet Union in the early 1980s to research a dissertation on the 19th-century right-leaning philosopher Nikolai Fedorov. Hagemeister’s interest in Fedorov, coupled with his ancestry—relatives had served as senior figures in the Romanov administration—convinced the rightist intellectuals he encountered that he was a kindred spirit. As a result, one of them, a specialist in German thought, asked if on his next trip he might bring along a copy of a book of great importance, a book that proved worldwide Jewish domination.

To Hagemeister, the plot laid out in The Protocols seemed no more current than the fear of the Illuminati or the Freemasons, the stuff of a Dan Brown bestseller. Its fortune has risen considerably since. Having now spent 30 years studying the text, Hagemeister told me recently that he isn’t surprised that it’s been used to explain the pandemic. The Protocols feels all the more pertinent, he added, at moments of crisis such as this one, when the righteous are urged to close their ranks to repel the enemy—a strategy the book suggests could effectively stop the Jews. Like QAnon’s missives or some of the finest novels, The Protocols is a narrative about the crucial moment just before cataclysm, and the notion that those horrors can still be averted with a swift and unequivocal response.

The belief captured by The Protocols that the world is in the clutches of a cabal—mighty, yet small enough to fit itself into the discreet, darkened corner of a club—certainly isn’t the sole possession of those who loathe Jews. But Jews, whether in the guise of Soros or Rothschild, Disraeli or Marx, provide a time-tested, biblically vetted vortex. And at a jittery moment such as ours, when it’s so easy to feel the world is cascading out of control, it’s revealing that The Protocols has shed its archaic feel.

Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. His latest book is Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, and he is now writing a biography of Philip Roth for Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series.

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www.theatlantic.com /technology/archive/2020/09/rising-s-vivos-and-the-booming-bunker-economy/616240/

The Bunker Magnates Hate to Say They Told You So

Annie Lowrey
13-16 minutes

“I’m not one of the paranoid kinds of people,” Michael, the 51-year-old owner of a construction company, told me this spring.

But who doesn’t look at the state of the world these days and get a little paranoid? It’s not just the virus and the economic collapse. It’s the protests, the fires, the cyberspying, the border shutdowns, the freezer trucks full of bodies, the disinformation on television—the sense that we are living with the economy of 1928, the civil society of 1968, the politics of 1868. “I don’t see a good outcome, whether he wins it or someone else wins it,” he said, talking about President Donald Trump. “It scares me. I’ve got two daughters. I think about all the sex rings they’ve been cracking down on,” he added. “Our country has almost got the qualities of a third-world country.”

When we spoke, that fear had driven him to pack up the family home in New Carlisle, Indiana, and get ready to caravan to South Dakota with his wife and school-age daughters, where they would live in a remote bunker that once stored sarin gas. It would be windowless and airless, but to him, it brought a sense of breathing room. Of peace.

Other folks have had the same idea this year: The American bunker business is booming, according to the handful of companies that compose it. Vivos, from which Michael bought his bunker, reports that inquiries have gone up 2,000 percent. “It’s exponential. It’s a surge. People are getting off the fence. And they’re saying, I need it, and I need it now,” Robert Vicino, the company’s founder, told me. At the Rising S Company, a maker of bunkers and other heavy-industry survival gear, sales have more than doubled. One client purchased 1,000 high-quality air filters. “It’s by far, by 20 times, the largest order we’ve ever taken of that product,” Gary Lynch, the company’s general manager, told me.

For the average family, the industry insists, a bunker is not an excess, a luxury. It is a necessity. A utility. A fire extinguisher. A smoke alarm. An insurance policy. A safety valve. Sad maybe, but this world requires it. “If you don’t believe today, that’s fine,” Vicino told me in April. “But you’ll all believe. And when you do, it will be too late to find accommodation. How are we doing on those face masks?”

Beyond the pandemic, economic collapse, and civil unrest, Vivos proffers a sprawling list of situations in which a bunker might be useful: solar flares, super volcanoes, “killer asteroids,” civil wars. Some scenarios are yet more esoteric. A bunker might be useful in case a “Planet X” shows up—an eventuality also known as the Nibiru Cataclysm, a conspiracy theory that goes back to the 1990s, promoted by a medium who received messages from aliens from the Zeta Reticuli star system.

But who needs to worry about the lost planet of Nibiru when what is going on right now is going on right now? “I’m not saying this is what happened,” Vicino told me, spooling out a hypothetical that he started thinking about this winter. “Start a pandemic. Hide the antidote. Allow it to get out of control. Quarantine countries. Stop international trade. Create a global economic collapse. Usher in a worldwide depression. Allow food riots and starvation. Watch the population kill itself off. Allow governments to collapse. The final thing is: Restore what’s needed once the population is reduced by 95 percent.” He paused for effect. “Now, that’s scary. That’s a conspiracy!”

Maybe the coronavirus is indeed a Thanos-like attempt at population control. Maybe a human did start the pandemic, not a wild bat or a caged pangolin. Maybe the aliens are already here. Whatever miserable or out-there eventuality you believe in or fear or want to avoid, whatever conspiracy or cataclysm haunts you, the American bunker business is here for you, ready to withstand nuclear fallout and electromagnetic pulses and grenade blasts and crop-killing pests and people who cough into their hand instead of their elbow.

It is a product that lets you believe what you want to believe, and comfort yourself against the horrors of that belief, alone and underground. The world is falling apart and nobody is there for you, 2020 has shown it over and over again. But American capitalism is.

On a wet morning, as the country’s coronavirus travel restrictions were falling into place, I went to tour a bunker with Lynch, a bearded, soft-spoken engineer, at Rising S’s production facility in semirural eastern Texas—wanting to see for myself how going to ground felt, and how a bunker might make sense given the state of the world. When I arrived at the factory, he was trying to buy industrial-strength alcohol. “Might want to make some hand sanitizer,” he chortled.   

The firm fabricates American-steel bunkers as small as 96 square feet or as big as 6,000, and submerges them on private properties, accessible via a flat-to-the-earth door. These can be designed to look like utility access panels and are easily hidden, Lynch told me. Rising S also obscures delivery and installation, making it seem like the company is doing sewage or landscaping work.

Heading in, neighbors none the wiser, a family fleeing pestilence, plague, or storm descends a steel staircase into what feels like a nice recreational vehicle. Pretty much everything within is handmade by the company’s craftsmen, Lynch said, as he ran his fingers over the finishes: the bunk beds, the kitchen sinks, the closets, the baths. He pointed out little touches that Rising S felt might make a difference for a family trapped—or saved, depending on how you look at it—underground, such as kick space beneath the kitchen cabinets and soft-white light bulbs for good glow.

Other amenities are available. One bunker the company recently built had an indoor shooting range and a greenhouse. Another had space for a client’s racehorses, which were ferried into the metal den by a purpose-built elevator hidden in a grain silo. A teapot bunker retails for just shy of $40,000; a more pharaonic model, complete with swimming pool and hot tub, bowling alley, and home theater, goes for $8 million. (Bunkers have become must-have items for conspiratorial or simply small-c conservative American oligarchs of late.)

Rising S’s most popular bunkers are utilitarian; its consumer base trends survivalist. Republicans are somewhat overrepresented, Lynch told me, though less than you might think, particularly since Trump’s election. (Very overrepresented? Dentists. Lynch had no idea why.)

Vivos, meanwhile, sells itself as a “modern day Noah’s Ark,” “the backup plan for humanity,” and a “solution to ride out and survive,” as the promotional materials put it, catering to those with more urgent, conspiratorial concerns. The company provides empty underground wombs in what are functionally bunker-condo complexes. Each unit promises a full calendar year of “autonomous underground survival” so that members can be confident they do not have to return to the surface until “the worst is over.” The advertised costs are $35,000, per unit or per person, depending. (The company does not make money, Vicino told me.)

Its main bunker complex, called xPoint and advertised as the world’s largest, is located in the Black Hills of South Dakota, at a munitions-storage facility decommissioned by the Army in the late 1960s. Up close, its concrete bunkers look like Swedish backstuga or the hobbit houses in The Lord of the Rings, half-built into the prairie and roofed with soil. Seen from the air, the edifices look a bit like hanging chads, or an allergy panel erupting on an immense, grassy back. Inside, each bunker is 2,200 square feet, with an arched ceiling, like an overturned pig trough. The floor plans are flexible, the possibilities endless, and the outside world kept outside by a blast-proof door.

Getting in a bunker with Lynch, I was surprised not to feel claustrophobic. The sense is much more of being in an RV or a shipping container than in a submarine. The other thing that struck me was how quiet it was. No birdsong, no traffic noise, no lawnmowers, no neighbors’ radios or misbehaved dogs. It reminded me a little of those saltwater isolation tanks that had a moment a few years ago. The world really did feel shut out.

Thus far, most of his clients have had cause to use their shelters only during natural disasters, Lynch told me, as we toured through model after model, staff members with welding equipment working around us, though one client had lived in his for nine months while avoiding social unrest in Venezuela. “He came out periodically just to check on things,” Lynch told me.

Here in the United States, it would take a long domino fall of terrible events to persuade Lynch to go underground, he said. “Personally, I think that social-civil unrest is the only thing a person should prepare for.” Unrest will lead to “pestilence, disease, famine—because the guy [who] works at the sewage treatment plant, he’s not going to work. He didn’t prepare. He’s going to be pillaging, robbing, and strong-arming people for cans of tomatoes. As absurd as it might sound, you’re not going to watch your children starve. You will kill your neighbor for a can of pork and beans to stop your kid starving. Everything could lead to a collapse of society.”

A few of Vivos’s clients concurred, explaining why they’d shelled out tens of thousands on a windowless concrete shack in the middle of nowhere. Tom and Mary, an affable and practical-sounding older couple—he works in IT, she worked in accounting and payroll; I agreed to refer to them by first names only to protect their privacy—once planned to build a fortress on 17 acres in central Tennessee, a house with a safe-house basement, basically, but instead settled on buying a bunker. It just made sense, they said. “Most people now, they’ve never experienced anything like our parents and grandparents went through,” Mary told me. “Younger people don’t understand the concept of it. They have no clue. I think that’s part of why there’s so much panic going on with the virus. I don’t think a lot of people were taught anything like this in school.” Tom concurred: “Growing up, we didn’t have running water for keeps in the house until I was in my late teens. The apocalypse, from my perspective, is not going to be that much different than when I was 12 years old. Aside from the hostile humans.”

It all seemed a little intense to me, and a little silly. So much pain and tumult exist out there. So many people have died alone, their family members prevented from holding them. So many people killed and maimed pointlessly in the street. There’s so much division, so much chaos, so much trauma. But is hiding out in the middle of nowhere really the answer? And if you are going to hide out, do you really have to be underground? But those questions also struck me as too literalistic. A bunker is not so much a utility as it is a security blanket.

The bunker business is just one instantiation, the grandest instantiation, of what you might think of as conspiracy capitalism. Conspiracy theories themselves are big business, of course, selling books, videos, conferences, and all kinds of merch. Then there is the economy that promotes conspiracy theories to sell goods such as supplements, survival gear, and yes, bunkers. Alex Jones and his InfoWars empire are the black hole at the center of this financial galaxy: Come for the Sandy Hook trutherism, and stay for the colloidal-silver pills and overelaborate water filters. (Jones did not respond to a request for comment for this piece.) Of course, this is just capitalism itself: Create a need or a fear, and hawk the solution for that need or fear. A bunker is a security blanket, and also a Swiffer, a yoni egg, an adult baby wipe.

When I asked Vicino how he felt about selling an imprecise fear, a terrible what-if and an expensive perhaps-then, he insisted that he did nothing of the sort. Would I accuse the creators of fire extinguishers of promoting fire? “Let me be frank: We don’t create the fear,” he told me. “We’re not stoking the fear. The fear is out there. Just listen to the news. Read your own publication. We’re not creating the fear. We’re resolving it. We’re a resolution for the fears. We’re giving people peace of mind.”

Too many people, maybe even me, are “not ready” for a bunker, he said. Maybe they do not have enough responsibility in their life. Maybe they do not take things seriously enough. Maybe there isn’t enough for them to care about. The issue with people who do not recognize the need for a good bunker lies with the people, not the bunkers, he proffered. Later this year, the whole world will be able to see what the bunker business does for people, he added: Right now, a camera crew is at Vivos, filming for a series. The place is filling up. Some very high-profile people, names withheld, are buying in. The bunkers are selling themselves.

Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers economic policy.

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www.theatlantic.com /ideas/archive/2020/09/how-anti-communist-conspiracies-haunt-brazil/614665/

Where Conspiracy Reigns

Vincent Bevins
15-19 minutes

Illustrations by Eren Su Kibele Yarman

As the 20th century began, conspiracy was simply how Brazilian politics got done. Paranoia was everywhere, and often warranted. Secret plotting and military coups were routine across the political spectrum. And by the end of the Cold War, citizens in Brazil’s young democracy had inherited a world of deep-seated suspicions, and would have to look back on a dizzying set of contradictory narratives to understand their own history.

In 1930, one of these putsches propelled a man named Getúlio Vargas to the presidency. Then conspiracies, both real and fake, helped lead the country to dictatorship. In 1935, a right-leaning newspaper published a story—entirely false—reporting that communists were planning an uprising that would eliminate “all non-communist officials.” But then leftists, worried about a fascist turn in the Vargas government, did attempt a real rebellion. It was quickly crushed, but not before Vargas used it to justify the consolidation of dictatorial powers.

Two years later, right-wing forces came up with another fake conspiracy, one that would stoke paranoia for decades. Plano Cohen, or the “Cohen Plan,” was, supposedly, a dastardly Jewish-Communist plot to overthrow the government. It was a forgery, drawn up by the fascist General Olímpio Mourão Filho. But it was presented—and covered by the press—as if it were real, and Vargas used the invented crisis as justification to carry out a new coup and launch a full-fledged dictatorship.

What happened over the next three decades provided even more fuel for Brazil’s culture of conspiracism. In 1962, with democracy restored, officials in Washington worried about President João “Jango” Goulart, a liberal reformer: In a recorded conversation, President John F. Kennedy and United States Ambassador Lincoln Gordon agreed they should discreetly inform the Brazilian military that it could take action “against the left,” if needed. The U.S. stepped up covert operations in Brazil, and Kennedy sent the military attaché Vernon Walters into the country. Brazil’s right-wing forces began to spread the accusation that a communist coup was brewing, even as they plotted themselves. When the U.S.-backed coup started on March 31, 1964, the charge on Rio de Janeiro was led by Mourão Filho—the same man who created Plano Cohen three decades earlier. The general that took over as the first “president” in the resulting dictatorship, Humberto Castelo Branco, had been roommates with Walters—JFK’s military man in Rio—back in the 1940s.

It’s no wonder that Brazil is fertile ground for conspiracy theory. What you just read is the true story of how Brazilian power and political might whipsawed back and forth from democracy to dictatorship in the 20th century; or at least it’s the closest thing we have to the truth. But this account emerged only after years of research, after historians pored over thousands of declassified documents; for a long time, anyone guessing at the real truth would have been, by definition, a conspiracy theorist. That’s because powerful actors had indeed conspired behind closed doors—to smear the left, to align Brasília with Washington, to lie to the public—but without all the evidence, the best citizens could do was theorize about their nature.

These episodes also point to a recurring pattern, and a dominant theme, in the politics of Brazilian conspiracy: The forces seeking to upend the social hierarchy in this stratified society usually lose, and those who win often weaponize conspiracy theory to justify their own movements. As a result, conspiracy theories in Brazil usually end up reinforcing the powers that be. Latin America’s largest country now offers a chilling reminder of the ways that rumor-mongering and disinformation can shore up elite power and subvert democracy.

For the past 100 years, by far the most powerful of Brazilian conspiracy theories is the tale of an international communist plot to destroy the nation. “The red menace is the most powerful threat used to scare Brazilians—both in the past and today. It is a story that many of us thought would go away after the end of the 20th century, but it has come back in a big way,” Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta, a historian and the author of On Guard Against the Red Menace: Anti-Communism in Brazil, 1917-1964, told me. “Without a doubt, conspiracy theories have helped authoritarians, time and time again, in Brazil.”

Recently, these traditions have coalesced once more, and helped deliver the country into the hands of Jair Bolsonaro. Making vigorous use of digital tools, and jumping headfirst into a political vacuum created by a huge corruption scandal, members of the Bolsonaro family deployed the fear of communist conspiracy to great effect. The ghosts of the Cold War haunt politics in the world’s fifth-most-populous country, and as another political crisis looms, the leadership is doubling down on conspiratorial thinking.

Read: The coronavirus-denial movement now has a leader

Brazil is much more like the U.S. than many North Americans realize. It is a huge Western European settler colony that displaced the indigenous population, brought in enslaved Africans, and then welcomed European and Asian immigrants. Both countries have the same racial hierarchy, in which white people are clearly in charge (though in Brazil, they are a minority), darker-skinned citizens are far more likely to suffer from poverty or imprisonment, and indigenous peoples barely survive on the margins of society. Many English speakers know that the Amazon is being destroyed; what they don’t usually know is that the forest is often cleared for literal cattle ranchers, complete with big belt buckles and boots and cowboy hats. Brazil is also far more likely to look to the U.S. for cultural inspiration than to Spanish-speaking Latin America—and this is as true now, in the era of right-wing YouTube intellectuals, as it was in the 20th century.

Just before that U.S.-backed coup in 1964, Brazil was grappling with societal changes very similar to those rocking society up north: Progressives were demanding that all Brazilians be given the right to vote, including the poor and the Black Brazilians excluded by literacy laws, and fighting to improve educational opportunities. But the military regime crushed democracy and froze the country’s social order in place, with the support of the white and privileged classes, always using the threat of communism to account for its crimes.

The Brazilian dictatorship helped its Chilean counterparts overthrow Salvador Allende in 1973, and then participated in the creation of Operation Condor, a (U.S.-backed) cross-border state-terror network that tracked and executed perceived enemies of South American military regimes around the continent, and around the world. The leaders of these dictatorships saw devious communist plotting wherever they liked, and used the threat of revolution to justify mass murder. Argentine General Jorge Rafael Videla, the leader of the deadliest dictatorship on the continent, said that he was fighting a vast “conspiracy against Civilization”—and often lumped in Judaism, homosexuality, and Freudian psychoanalysis with communist subversion, according to the historian Federico Finchelstein.

When that threat wasn’t powerful enough to keep the citizenry subdued, right-wing radicals fabricated events to support their fearmongering. Modern conspiracy theorists the world over are fond of dismissing mass shootings and other acts of violence as staged “false-flag” operations, but in Brazil, they really were routinely used by terrorists or the military to create the conditions for further crackdowns. The most famous of these is the Riocentro bombing: In 1981, military officers opposed to the re-democratization of Brazil planned to place explosives at a May Day concert taking place in the largest exhibition center in Latin America, then blame the left for the violence and prolong the dictatorship. But one of the bombs went off early, giving away the game.

Renée DiResta: For China, the ‘USA virus’ is a geopolitical ploy

In the late 1980s, Brazilian media reported that a hot-headed right-winger had planned another bombing. The prominent magazine Veja alleged that a young army captain named Jair Bolsonaro had been scheming to plant explosives at a military academy outside of Rio, reportedly to protest low salaries for soldiers. (The plot was never carried out, and Bolsonaro has denied being involved.) Soon after, Bolsonaro left the military and entered politics, beginning a 30-year career in which he defended torture and said that change in Brazil will only come through political assassination and the mass murder of innocent civilians. He railed against homosexuality and political correctness as he celebrated anti-communist violence, while all around him, a new generation of conservative Brazilians took inspiration from the English-speaking internet.

All of this positioned Bolsonaro to carry on a tradition of conspiracism. “Anti-communism has a long history in the country, and has been instrumentalized at different moments. That is one of the key links between our current moment and the 1964 coup,” Flávia Biroli, a political scientist at the University of Brasília, told me. “It’s important to remember that the idea of moral decay was behind anti-communism too—the threat to the family was mentioned then and is back now. Bolsonaro brings these two elements together, and he does it very well.”

Over the past two decades, left-leaning politicians mostly governed Brazil. This was the era of the “pink tide,” on which a generation of leftist leaders won elections in Latin America, buoyed by the Chinese demand for these nations’ commodities. But in the background, a constellation of conservative thinkers, influenced by American internet culture and driven by conspiracy theory, were slowly rising to power, and considerable fame. They saw an international conspiracy behind left-wing success in the region, and the risk of totalitarianism—or a Venezuela-style collapse, or both—on the horizon. When Brazil hosted the World Cup in 2014, the Veja columnist Rodrigo Constantino looked at the soccer tournament’s logo—which had red in it, unlike Brazil’s flag—and said it was likely subliminal socialist propaganda.

Constantino is deeply inspired by right-wing thought in the U.S.: He recently advertised an online class on the “radicalization” of the Democratic Party, drawing on thinkers such as Ann Coulter and Dinesh D’Souza. But the master guru of Brazilian conspiratorial thinking, the godfather of the anti-communist crusade, is Olavo de Carvalho. “Olavo,” as he is often called, is a former astrologer and obscure philosopher with a number of published books, though he is most famous for the YouTube videos, tweets, and Facebook posts he publishes from his home in Virginia, where he has lived since 2005. His essays include commonsense critiques of early-21st-century political correctness, and his online output contains the kind of wild provocations—he has claimed that Pepsi uses aborted fetuses as sweetener, and frequently references anal sex—that always garner traffic and attention.

Like Constantino’s flag theory, and the fear of continental conspiracy, his ideas were mostly ignored or ridiculed by the mainstream media. But then a political explosion left a crater where the political establishment used to be. A crusading anti-corruption investigation, code-named “Car Wash,” revealed over the course of several agonizing years that Brazilian politicians routinely used bribes to run the economy and govern the country. This wasn’t a few bad apples—it was the whole machine that took form after the fall of the dictatorship.

“The Brazilian people found out something they did not know that caused the system to implode, and you have not been able to restore stable government or trust in the country’s institutions,” Matias Spektor, an international-relations professor at the Fundação Getulio Vargas university in São Paulo, told me. And this lack of trust made Brazil, once more, a hotbed of wild speculation. “Conspiracy theories have become far more important in the last five years, because popular distrust in the political system has opened the door to extremists, crazies, and, above all, opportunists who resort to fake news to get elected into office,” he said.

This collapse of systemic legitimacy happened at the same time that, around the world, the rise of social media was undermining a shared sense of reality in even the most stable democracies. In 2016, Brazil’s National Congress impeached President Dilma Rousseff, leaving in office the much more conservative Michel Temer. But the traditional center-right parties also had their reputations undermined by the ongoing corruption investigation, and by their support for the catastrophically unpopular Temer. So Bolsonaro stepped into the void, coming from far enough out on the right-wing political fringes that he could claim he was not part of the corrupt establishment.

Read: Here’s how Jair Bolsonaro wants to transform Brazil

Violent anti-communism had always been Bolsonaro’s political banner, and now he claimed that he was saving the country from enemies at home and abroad. On the day he voted to impeach Rousseff, he told me that the country could become like North Korea if the Workers’ Party was not stopped. Associating himself with the most powerful country on Earth, he and his politician sons made a big show of supporting President Donald Trump.

The 2018 election was strange. Usually, Brazilian politicians rely on television advertisements. Bolsonaro did not. His campaign was powered, to a large extent, by mass messages sent out on WhatsApp. Fake news was rampant; at one point, digital messaging accused his rival, Fernando Haddad, of attempting to indoctrinate the country’s youth into homosexuality. De Carvalho said that Haddad supported both Marxism and incest, which he conflated. After someone in the crowd at a campaign event stabbed Bolsonaro in the stomach, he ran his campaign from a hospital bed, and memes circulated alleging that the attacker, by all accounts a mentally disturbed man acting alone, was actually sent by powerful left-wing forces. Bolsonaro won easily—in part thanks to a movement made up of young radicals who came of age politically watching YouTube videos, and would not stop disseminating conspiracy theories in the service of their political project. Many, including Eduardo Bolsonaro, one of the president’s sons, are Olavista, or deeply inspired by de Carvalho.

Less than two years into its existence, the Bolsonaro administration is constantly in a state of crisis, and it responds to this pressure by doubling down on conspiratorial accusations. The latest emergency is the novel coronavirus, which has now killed more than 115,000 Brazilians and infected 3.5 million more—including Bolsonaro himself—after the administration spent much of the spring and summer explicitly condemning social-distancing measures, downplaying the severity of the pandemic, and defying medical advice.

In April, when Bolsonaro was reeling from the criticism of his handling of the virus, his foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo—apparently recommended by de Carvalho—posted a lengthy review of a Slavoj Žižek book on his personal blog. He said that “globalists” planned to use the pandemic to usher in world communism.

“Coronavirus is making us wake up once more to the communist nightmare,” it began. “The Comunavirus has arrived.”

 

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