Q&A: Zach Mack on Getting Through to the Conspiracy Theorist in His Family

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Zach Mack’s father said weird things here and there before the pandemic, but once the world shut down, in 2020, he veered deep into a world of conspiracy and political prophecy. He’d always had a penchant for certain theories—he was skeptical of institutions, broadly, and opposed vaccines—but during lockdown he began following MAGA-aligned, QAnon-adjacent “prophets” who made bold proclamations on the internet. There was “a lot of political upheaval and apocalyptic type of events where usually the right is overthrowing the left, and lots of people involved on the left [are] rounded up and thrown in jail for being secret pedophiles,” Mack said. 

After a holiday blowout, Mack confronted his father about his radicalization. To prove he was right, Mack’s father offered a wager: he’d make ten predictions for the year of 2024, and if they didn’t come to fruition, he’d give Mack ten thousand dollars. Being that Mack was an established audio journalist with Vox who had worked in public radio and for The Ringer and This American Life, his “producer brain went off,” he says. He asked his father if he could interview him over the course of the year for a podcast. This past Sunday, Mack released Alternate Realities, a three-part series on NPR about his attempt to bring his dad back from the quagmire of conspiracism. Any hesitancy he may have had about reporting on his family was mitigated by the relevance of the subject matter in today’s political and cultural landscape. “This was a really important story that I thought would connect with a lot of people,” he says. “I feel like everyone has at least an uncle who has been totally radicalized online.” 

The series, which takes a surprisingly lighthearted tone to describe a difficult and uncomfortable situation, charts Mack’s father’s predictions over the course of 2024. His parents’ names are not used in the series for the sake of privacy, but his sister, friends, and pastors all weigh in as Mack attempts to break through the fog of misinformation. (“We are literally living in the Matrix today,” Mack’s father says at one point.) “If you can become two humans with emotions rather than two warring worldviews,” says a friend in the trailer, “you have a chance.” 

Last week, Mack and I spoke about learning how to communicate across echo chambers, the different ways conspiracy theories serve those who get caught up in them, and how our perception of truth leads us to accept or reject people based on their beliefs. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

KL: When did your father start to engage with this kind of ideology? 

ZM: He comes to a lot of this through his deep religious faith. He is the lone Christian conservative in our household; my mom is a liberal Jewish woman. That’s where it starts. On top of that, he is really bad with technology and just very lost on the internet. It makes him very susceptible to misinformation. The other big thing that happened was, through his faith, he came to believe in prophets, which is the belief that God still speaks through intermediaries. That is somewhat divisive within Christianity; a lot of [Christians] do not believe that. So, as he started to adopt this new belief in prophets, he then began seeking out prophets online and found a number of very Trumpy, MAGA-type prophets who would make a lot of bold proclamations and predictions about the future. If you’d been surveying the media landscape, these were not [all] new ideas. This is a lot of stuff that QAnon had been talking about for years. 

Were the conspiracy theories he followed predominantly on the fringe or about mainstream topics?

They’re increasingly mainstream, especially with the election of Trump and the massive adoption of conspiracy theories—like the 2020 election being fraudulent, vaccines being fraudulent, the deep state and a small group of elites secretly controlling the world. So many of the things he predicted—things like Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and the Clintons all being tried for treason—are really emblematic of the increased polarization we have right now, where the political party that you support is just and good, and the one that you don’t support [is made up of] pedophiles and treasonous criminals.

What was the most shocking conspiracy theory that you encountered throughout the process? 

My father left me a voicemail talking about how to stock up on a couple of months’ worth of food and water because he believed that an electromagnetic pulse device would be used to wipe out the grid and all digital communication across the US. He was encouraging me to stock up on food. It just painted a really grim, apocalyptic view of where he thought the next year was going to go.

Which of his predictions was closest to reality?

He got close on a few. He said all the charges against Trump would be dropped. Trump got convicted in his first trial, in May, but on the rest, it looks like everything is getting thrown out. He said Eric Adams would be removed as mayor; Eric Adams has been flirting with removal for months now. Just so you don’t think he’s Nostradamus or anything, he did say this [when] Adams was already under investigation. He believes that a secret cabal of global elites are pulling strings to control the world. And I’m just like, It’s all playing out in plain sight with people like Elon Musk. There are billionaires pulling the strings and moving things towards their self-interest. But we know who they are and we can see what they’re doing. It’s fairly out in the open. 

What is his media diet like? 

Early on, some people would send him a link here, or a link there, and then he would go from there. Or he found this prophet through literally just googling “God’s prophets.” And again, because he’s an unsophisticated internet user, he just stumbles upon things: you watch a video on YouTube and the next one’s weirder and then the next one’s weirder. At some point he got over to Rumble [an alternative video platform popular on the right]; it’s no-holds-barred over there. There was a time where he would watch some broadcast news, but he’s not a Fox News guy. [My parents] would get the San Francisco Chronicle, but mostly he’d read the sports page or the comics and my mom would actually read the substantive news stuff. He’s never expressed much interest in news or politics—this is all sort of coming through his interest and belief in religion. The issue is that the religious stuff he’s interacting with, more and more, is increasingly political. That is steering his politics.

The bet was your father’s idea? 

It was. Last January—a year ago—I was home for Christmas, and we had a family blowout where my sister and I both left the house early. A week or two later, we got on the phone and I said, Hey, I think you’re being radicalized online. You’re talking about increasingly weird stuff. I know how this goes. I can tell you where you’re going to be in two months, in two years. I see this stuff all the time through work. Obviously he didn’t agree with me. His response was, I’m going to send you a list of predictions, and when you see that, you’ll know that I’m the one who knows what they’re talking about and you don’t. Then he sent me a list of ten predictions and a challenge to a bet for ten thousand dollars. And I thought, Great, now I can hold you accountable; if you put down on paper that this is going to happen however long from now, I can show you this didn’t happen and then maybe we could have a dialogue about changing your media diet and changing your mind, eventually. It was always an opportunity to try to change his mind and pull him away from this stuff. 

What was it like trying to communicate across the various echo chambers of your respective worlds? What was that translation like? 

The podcast had everything to do with our ability to communicate. Before the podcast, all we did was have circular arguments that went nowhere. Once I started interviewing him, it allowed me to switch into a different role and just be curious and a little more empathetic. I was able to just ask him questions and be more patient with him. Through this, he saw and responded to my curiosity. Then we could just talk as people. We didn’t have to fight or just have these ongoing debates. Once we made the bet, I saw it as a truce where, okay, for the next year, we’re going to set aside having these arguments, and we’re just going to try to understand each other a little bit better. Then, in a year, we’ll see who’s right and who’s wrong and we’ll know. It’ll be clear. It’s weird because, as my family’s falling apart, my dad and I are closer than we’ve ever been. We’re having deeper, more meaningful conversations than we’ve ever had by far; we were not close before this. I have a much greater understanding of who he is, how he came to these ideas, and what these ideas are doing for him as well. 

When you’re communicating with a conspiracy theorist, it’s frustrating, it’s exhausting, it’s difficult, because there’s no amount of research you can do that will prepare you. They’re always, at some point, going to bring up something you don’t know about or can’t go as deep on. At some point, you won’t be able to satisfy their every tangent.

How should people who do not have the same relationships manage that same method of communication across various sets of worldviews? 

The mistake I made early on is just thinking, Oh, you read the wrong thing, and now I just need to send you the right thing. I just need to provide you with the right fact and you’ll be set. That’s not how it works. The first thing you have to do is be a little curious and be a little empathetic and try to understand how this person came to these beliefs, and what these beliefs are doing for them. For example, an appeal for a lot of conspiracy theorists is having access to esoteric knowledge that other people don’t have; it’s sort of like, I’m up on this, but you’re not up on this yet. You see the same behavior in other cultures, right? Sneakerheads are kind of the same thing: I have these Jordans in a special color that you can’t get. Therefore I’m elevated in status.

When you were learning about how to better communicate with your father and how he understands the world, did the process teach you any valuable lessons about how you interact with the media? 

There’s something he said to me in our final interview, which was quite contentious: he could accept and love me regardless of my beliefs, and he felt like the family could not accept and love him in spite of his beliefs. That’s true. That’s difficult. That is what is happening. It’s tremendously heartbreaking. Accepting someone’s beliefs, even if you know that they’re wrong, or just could not disagree more—what is your threshold for that? Sometimes being in media is to come in with the attitude that I know best and I know it all. I don’t think people respond well to that attitude. You’re just not going to have a lot of success with people. You also might not even be able to reevaluate things yourself. 

Can you pull someone back out of the conspiracy rabbit hole? What do you think of other people’s chances based upon your own experience?

If a person is unwilling to change, they won’t. The person who’s trying to save someone from the rabbit hole, you have to know your threshold; you have to know a point where there’s only so much you can do and you have to meet them where they’re at. It’s incredibly sad, but you can’t force it. I talked to clinicians, former evangelical pastors, journalists, and all kinds of conspiracy experts. They all said it’s really, really hard; you’re going to be really unlikely to pull anyone out, because it’s hard to change someone’s mind in general, and these ideas are so insidious and corrosive—and they’re also providing them with something. Unless you’re able to figure out what that is and swap it out for something healthier, you’re probably not going to have a lot of luck. The truth is fragile. You have to really protect it.

Kevin Lind was a CJR fellow.