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What to Do about Q

Ever present on the fringe, conspiracy talk has pierced the mainstream.

The kinds of conspiracy theories that we see circulating today are what I call “conspiracism.”

They’re theory-less. They’re assertions that something was rigged, something was hidden, but there’s no elaborate theory behind them. For example, there’s no elaborate theory behind the claim that the 2016 or the 2020 election was rigged. There are only a bunch of disconnected assertions that don’t really fit together into a cohesive story.

Conspiracism takes hold in part through the deliberate spread of misinformation through a practice that Vladimir Putin pioneered called “flooding the zone.” People or outlets that spread false information are not trying to persuade people of anything in particular. They’re just trying to make it hard for people to figure out what’s going on by flooding the internet with misinformation so that people who say, “I’m going to go on the internet to try to figure out what’s going on,” may well discover that they can’t because there’s so much misinformation there.

President Trump was incredibly important in giving a megaphone to conspiracism. He had always been interested in conspiracist ideas—birtherism a case in point—which had been on the fringe until he became a political force. He took these ideas from the fringe and amplified them in public appearances that were reported on the news and through his Twitter account. And he actually weaponized a lot of these ideas as well. He knew what he was doing—or at least his outfit knew—in that they picked which conspiracies they would amplify, and they amplified the ones that they thought were useful to them. Often this meant recycling the kind of charges of voter fraud that have historically been used in the South in regions with large numbers of Black voters.

When it comes to newer and more bizarre examples of conspiracism, such as QAnon, one of the questions people often ask is, how can people believe in all these crazy things, some of which are contradictory? For example, one claim associated with QAnon is that Hillary Clinton had John F. Kennedy Jr. killed. But another is that JFK Jr. currently lives in Pittsburgh and is in cahoots with Donald Trump. Well, how could both of these things be true at the same time?

One explanation is that QAnon is gamified, meaning that people can pick and choose which parts of it they believe. Some people believe one of those statements, some people believe the other, some people believe neither of them, and some people do actually believe both.

The challenge of conspiracist phenomena such as QAnon is they create cult-like followings among large groups of people. How do we then pull people from the cult? We’re now seeing data showing that QAnon has geographic pockets in the country. You can’t deprogram an individual who lives in a town where most of the people in that town also follow QAnon. How do we adapt the strategies that have been used to get people out of cults? How do we apply those on a macro level to large groups of people who are geographically connected?

The end of the pandemic may help. People have been more isolated, which means the echo chamber has become narrower. When cults recruit people, they isolate them, and they keep them in that echo chamber long enough until they’ve been able to radicalize them. The number of QAnon members and people under other fringe groups today would be much lower if the pandemic hadn’t forced us all to isolate in the way that it did.