QAnon: The rise in conspiracy theories threatens to change our politics

By now, we’re all keenly aware of the threat posed by the novel coronavirus and we all know first-hand how our race to meet that threat head-on has altered the way we learn, do business and interact with each other.

But another sea-change is coming. The stupendous rise in the popularity and prevalence of conspiracy theories threatens to undermine the basis for civil discourse in America. Conspiratorial paranoia is spreading like a psychological virus through the American population. If we can’t stop that virus from festering in the American consciousness, the fate and the future of normal American politics is at stake. To see why, you have to get into the mindset of a conspiracy theorist.

Conspiracy theories are outlets for paranoia and suspicion

Major conspiracy theories like QAnon have been making headlines in recent weeks and months, and it’s all too obvious why. What could be more interesting or even alarming in an election year than that 56% of Republicans and about half of Trump supporters believe the claims by QAnon that senior Democrats and political officials are leading a satanic cabal of pedophiles and that Donald Trump is the only one who can stop them?

Like most other conspiracy theories, QAnon is less like a set of fixed beliefs and more like a symptom of a mental disease. The claims advanced by conspiracy theorists may be baseless, even outrageous and grotesque at times, but that’s a feature, not a bug. The temptation is to think that conspiracy theories are well-meaning attempts, however deranged, at explaining reality. Quite to the contrary, conspiracy theories are far less about making sense of the world and far more about finding an outlet for a seething morass of paranoia, suspicion and distrust. They are weaponized stupidity and monetized myth.

Conspiracy theories feed, not on facts, but on fantasy. That means most conspiracy theories are incredibly malleable and amorphous at their core. Take the antisemitic conspiracy behind the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an example. The belief that Jewish people somehow command and control political, social and economic realities has taken a variety of different forms over the decades, even centuries, of its existence. Hardly anyone today believes in all of the literal claims of the original Protocols document. But that hasn’t stopped the same pattern of thinking, the same psychology, from recurring again and again in new forms. In many respects, QAnon itself is a modern day rehashing of this same old antisemitism.

That flexibility and malleability makes it difficult, if not impossible, to defeat a conspiracy theory for good. Almost anything that increases feelings of uncertainty, distrust and confusion can act as a viral vector for a new and mutated infection by conspiratorial thinking. Digital media only exaggerates this feature of conspiracy theories. Today’s prophets are no longer flesh and blood, but anonymous posters. This anonymity, coupled with the power of digital media to reach anyone at any time, massively increases the resilience and life-span of conspiracy theories.

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QAnon is perhaps the paradigmatic example of this. QAnon isn’t surging in popularity because people are unearthing more and more evidence that its central contentions are true. Rather, people feel more and more scared and paranoid, and QAnon provides an outlet. The digital prophet behind QAnon can capitalize off of uncertainty and ignorance to get more and more people to drink the Kool-Aid. In our post-truth world rife with uncertainty, misinformation, and doubt, conspiracy theories capture the imagination of the paranoid and the fearful with incredible ease.

But QAnon is not alone. Across the political spectrum, conspiracy theories abound. And while they may seem silly or too outlandish to be significant, they are far from harmless.

The danger of conspiracy theories that dehumanize groups

Many conspiracy theories explicitly and unashamedly dehumanizes whole groups of people. Yet above and beyond the very real threat of violent extremism and domestic terrorism posed by a dehumanizing conspiracy, widespread paranoia erodes the possibility of civil discourse in our society today. You can’t have a conversation about facts, policies, or positions if one side of the debate is fundamentally convinced that the other is satanic and evil. At that point, we don’t have political disagreements anymore; instead, we have moral and spiritual warfare. When paranoid fantasy takes the place of reality in the minds of millions of Americans, we can’t expect politics as usual to function for very long.

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What’s more, there are no quick and easy fixes for the threat to our politics and social welfare posed by conspiracies. In a digital age, conspiracy theories will always have ample room to grow and plenty of space to fester, and there’s an incredibly destructive power latent in collective stupidity weaponized by digital media. If you ban the QAnon posters from YouTube or Twitter, they will simply move to Bitchute and Parler. Nothing short of a comprehensive effort both to stifle misinformation and reeducate the conspiratorial will do. But such an effort will be hard to mobilize and even harder to implement.

In the meantime, ordinary Americans have their work cut out for them dealing with friends, family members and coworkers who have been sucked in by conspiracies. My only advice is that we, as a nation, have to practice an unprecedented degree of courage to speak out against conspiracy theories and challenge misinformation whenever and wherever we find it. I can’t say whether that will be enough. But I know that if we don’t get courageous now, pretty soon it will be too late.

Rep. Denver Riggleman is Republican from Virginia, subject matter expert on data analytics for the Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD) and author of “Bigfoot… It’s Complicated.” He served as a United States Air Force Intelligence Officer supporting the global war on terror.

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