Red Pill, Blue Pill

How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories

That Are Killing Us

DAVID NEIWERT

Guilford, Connecticut
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200
Lanham, MD 20706
www.rowman.com

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Copyright © 2020 by David Neiwert

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Neiwert, David A., 1956– author.
Title: Red pill, blue pill : how to counteract the conspiracy theories that are
killing us / David Neiwert.
Description: Lanham, MD : Prometheus Books, [2020] | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A revealing trip
down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories-their appeal, who believes
them, how they spread-with an eye to helping people deal with the alt-
right conspiracists in their own lives. Conspiracy theories are killing
us”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020005105 (print) | LCCN 2020005106 (ebook) | ISBN
9781633886261 (cloth) | ISBN 9781633886278 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Conspiracy theories—United States. | Conspiracy theories
—Political aspects—United States. | Right-wing extremists—United
 States—Psychology. | Radicalism—United States. | Political culture—
United States. | United States—Politics and government—1989-
Classification: LCC HV6275 .N45 2020 (print) | LCC HV6275 (ebook) |
DDC 001.9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005105
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005106

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
CONTENTS

Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Prologue

1 Conspiracies and Theories

2 The Red Pilled
3 Sacrifices
4 Tangled Tales
5 A Brave New World Order
6 The Rabbit Hole
7 Chaos by Design
8 Everybody Get in Line
9 A Pill for Healing

Notes
PROLOGUE

Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them

to arm themselves. . . . Sometimes sacrifices have to be
made.
—Gunman Stephen Paddock, three weeks before opening
fire on a country music festival in Las Vegas, according to an
informant

I used to be a “normal” American guy—I went to school, I got a good

job, I had a house, a car, I used to love “stuff” . . . and I had everything:
the electronic toys, the clothes, the gadgets, and all the accessories. I used
to love movies: I had a massive movie collection. I used to love music: I
had hundreds of gigs of music. I have a stack of concert ticket stubs and
tons of concert T-shirts. My yard and house were very respectable, I
spent time and money landscaping. I watched the news. I had debates
with coworkers and family members about politics. I even had hobbies:
coin collecting, woodworking, mountain biking, and surfing. I used to
put on my good suit and go to church on Sunday and talk with all the
other people there. I saw my career as a path toward upward mobility. I
played politics in the company. I worked overtime. I got in good with the
boss. I climbed the corporate ladder.
 But, then, I started to really get into Conspiracy Theory (back like in
2012/2013). I went DEEP down the rabbit hole and came out the other
side. I wanted to know EVERYTHING! I did days and weeks of
research. I immersed myself completely. In 2016 I jumped into Pizzagate
research with both feet. I devoured everything there was to know. Then,
in 2017, I hopped on the QAnon bandwagon and went even deeper.
Something changed inside of me. I woke up! I no longer saw the
world as I used to. I quit my job. I sold my stuff. I’ve downsized my
entire life. I’ve been living off my savings for a few years now. I no
longer see a point in participating in the “real” (fake) world. I know that
everything I see is a lie. Everything that I’ve ever known is a lie. My
whole world has been nothing but one giant lie from the start, and I can
see that clearly now. So why bother? What is the point of perpetuating
the corrupt system by playing along. Why bother pretending that
anything matters? I have myself set up in a good situation financially. I
spend very little money and I grow a lot of my own food. My expenses
are minimal. I may never have to work again. I can just live on the bare
minimum and avoid the fake world altogether.
The only people that I actually hang out and talk to are people who
know the truth. I can’t even interact with people who still believe the fake
world is real. I just can’t do it. Basically, I can no longer function in the
fake real world. It pains me to play along with some stupid game that I
know is fake. Now all I do is sit around here (and various other
conspiracy forums) and look for news of “The Event.” I’m waiting for
that one trigger event that will end this whole corrupt system. I keep
watching and waiting and praying. Maybe it will be a huge war? Maybe
it will be a financial collapse? Maybe it will be some external event
(aliens)? Either way, we’re on the edge of the cliff and looking down into
the abyss. It’s only a matter of time before this whole thing blows up and
ends.
Until then, I’m just going to drop out and mind my own business. I’m
going to wait and learn as much as I can. Someday, when it all comes
crashing down, a huge weight will be lifted off my shoulders and I will
finally get to exist in the real world again.
Does anyone else feel this way?
—Anonymous contributor at Voat.com, an Internet message board,
October 2018
They call it “getting red-pilled.” We all know the metaphor, the one from
The Matrix: Morpheus holds out his hands to reveal two small pills: “You
take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe
whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in
Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Like the
hypercool hero Neo in the films, true believers in the alternative universe of
conspiracy theories are absolutely convinced that the epistemological
bubble into which they have submerged themselves is the real reality.
The problem, of course, is that their version of reality isn’t based in
facts, sound evidence, or even logical reasoning, but rather is a complex
farrago of conjecture, false facts and evidence, wild-eyed paranoia, and
sociopathic authoritarianism. Rather than giving people who think they
have “taken the red pill” a clear-eyed view of the world as it really is,
conspiracism actually creates a crackpot version of reality in which the
world is secretly run by a cabal of scheming Jewish globalists who control
both the banks and the media, in which their planned one-world
government is intent on disarming private citizens and putting them in
concentration camps and in which Muslims work in cahoots with Marxists
to destroy Western civilization.
It used to be that such people were few in number and mostly relegated
to the fringes of society, their theories and claims the frequent source of
amusement for some people. Now, the leading conspiracy theorists have
audiences numbering in the millions, and their views are shared not just
with the audiences on mainstream right-wing cable shows, but also by the
president of the United States and members of his administration.
And it is killing us, both metaphorically and literally. Conspiracism is
much of the fuel that feeds the rise of the radical right both in the United
States and around the world, and its toxic effects on our communities and
our democracy will be felt for many years to come. It feeds the
scapegoating, fear, and eliminationism that in turn are the foundations of
hate crimes and acts of domestic terrorism. More precisely, it has played an
outsized role in fueling gun-related violence, particularly mass shootings:
nearly every gun rampage in which large numbers of people have been
killed in recent years has been perpetrated by men who have been
radicalized on Internet forums devoted to conspiracy theories. Perhaps the
most notorious of these was the mass shooter in Las Vegas in October 2017,
who killed 58 people and injured another 851, driven by a belief in a
government plot to take away Americans’ guns.
This is where the very far end of the “red-pilled” spectrum reaches its
apotheosis. The young people (mostly male) consumed by this
radicalization call this “black-pilling”: a bleakly nihilistic mindset in which
the world’s doom is seen as inevitable. The system is too rotten, the global
environment poised for catastrophe, everything is too far gone. So violence
becomes not just excusable, but a way of going out, paradoxically, with
some kind of meaning, even if it’s just the “score” you can roll up in a mass
murder, glorified among your fellow trolls at 4chan and Reddit who have,
horrifically, “gamified” these killings.1
Eventually, the online participants in all this “pilling” have evolved a
whole pharmacopeia of variously colored pills that radicalize in different
ways:

Purple pill: A kind of “normie,” or centrist, version of red-pilling that

rejects both red- and blue-pilling, essentially acknowledging that the
system is broken, but seeing possibilities for redemption and urging
work toward it.
Pink pill: A kind of female version of the “black pill,” which is
dominated by “involutary celibate” males (better known as “incels”),
in which the people consuming it come to believe they’ll never be
accepted as attractive by males and, similarly, embrace nihilistic
violence.
White pill: A pill that embraces an optimistic view of whatever
extremist “red-pilled” movement the person consuming it has joined.
It’s mostly an enhancement “pill.”
Bread pill: A dual-meaning pill: on the extreme right, it references
people who have embraced traditionalist religious beliefs about gender
and sex; on the extreme left, it signals an embrace of anarcho-
communism.
Green pill: As its name suggests, this means an embrace of radical
environmentalism, but of a specifically far-right kind that blames many
of the world’s environmental ills on nonwhite people in third-world
nations. This world-view is called “eco-fascism,” and it encourages
often viciously racist views directed at immigrants, refugees, and
minority religions.2
 The conspiracism innate to “red-pilling” is toxic on a personal and
familial level, too. It affects interpersonal relationships when friends and
family members refuse to clamber down the rabbit hole with them, since
their refusal not only makes them, in the eyes of those who have swallowed
it, certain sheep-like pawns in the vast conspiracy they see, but even
potential conspirators. As the phenomenon spreads, thousands of families
are being torn apart by the anger and fear the conspiracist industry
generates, sometimes with fatal consequences.

________

Lane Davis’s favorite song in high school, according to his senior yearbook,
was “Loser.” It seems fitting. The rest of his inscription featured offbeat
aphorisms—“In the time of monkeys I was a chimpanzee” (a line from the
Beck song), “Getting needles stuck through me and steel implanted,”
“Anywhere in life, make the best outta the situation. Keep it real while
maintaining the front”—suggesting alienation and someone ill at social
ease.
Blond with soft, heavy features, Davis looked large in these photos but
really wasn’t. He wasn’t athletic, didn’t play football like a lot of guys in
rural Skagit County, Washington, where he grew up. Thumbing through the
2002 Burlington-Edison High Tinas Coma, you can spot him here and there
but mostly lurking on the fringes—in the debate team room, posing with a
Speedy Gonzales figure, looking skeptical and painfully hip in his senior
photo.
He and his family—mom, dad, brother, and sister—lived out in the
sticks, on Samish Island, which actually ceased being an island sometime in
the early twentieth century when local landowners built a system of dikes
that created a permanent causeway between the island and the mainland, so
people drive on and off it across the main road at any time. But it is part of
a cultural landscape populated with island communities, ferries, boats, and
wildlife. Getting to high school each day entailed a thirty-minute drive
across delta farmland.
Lane’s dad, Charles “Chuck” Davis, was an attorney known around the
community as “Mr. Samish Island.” He organized all kinds of community
activities, including sailing activities that taught young people how to
handle a boat. He and his wife, Catherine, were pillars of the community,
and their home was centrally located on a curve overlooking Samish Bay.3
Their daughter Allison and son Peter were both considered bright, outgoing,
pleasant young people. Their son Lane, not so much. He was, as polite
Northwesterners put it, “difficult.” Surly. Harsh. Highly intelligent and
contemptuous of others around him.
When Lane graduated, he enrolled at the university on the other side of
the state, Washington State, in the rolling Palouse farmland and began
studying physics.4 He washed out after only a year or so, though. After that
he wandered quite a bit, career-wise. He worked in the software world
around the Seattle/Redmond area for a few years, but nothing ever stuck. In
2009, though, he began finding his future: online.
That was the year Lane first popped up on YouTube under the nom de
plume Seattle4Truth.5 His first few videos were dabblings in health-related
conspiracy theories, as well as Davis’s theories about physics, which he
eventually published on a dubious-science website called The General
Science Journal. Titled “Quantum Cold-Case Mysteries Revisited,” it was a
series of ruminations on quantum physics that were, in fact, regurgitated
and utterly discredited theories about perpetual motion. For most of the first
year or so online, Lane’s video output was along similar niche crackpot
lines.
But then he began spreading out, creating videos that became
increasingly imbued in far-right conspiracism. One video claimed the
Oklahoma City bombing was a false flag, while another “exposed” the
hoary conspiracy by the Jewish Rothschild family to control world banking
and government. The 9/11 attacks were an insider “false flag” event. People
who consume public drinking water are dosing themselves with mind-
controlling lithium. In a media market where such videos were as common
as seagulls at a fisherman’s wharf, Lane’s videos didn’t make much of a
mark.
He made his living by working at an aluminum smelter in Ferndale, an
hour’s drive from Samish Island, where he told friends he made a six-figure
salary. He had a place of his own near Bellingham during those years but
kept making videos. When he was laid off in 2014, he had to move back to
Samish Island, where he took up a wing of his parents’ home and tried
figuring out other ways to make a splash online.
He struck online gold, finally, in 2015 with an epic three-hour-twenty-
minute pastiche about the so-called Gamergate controversy, titled
“#Gamergate: Actually, It’s about . . .” Comprised mostly of clips arguing
that discussions and seminars within the computer gaming corporations and
the larger design community were part of a larger plot by “cultural
Marxists” to make video games less “masculine”—that is, less structured
around first-person-shooter architecture—as part of a larger globalist
scheme to emasculate young white males.
Not only was it a massive hit, it brought him to the attention of some of
the gods of the Gamergate world, particularly Breitbart News’ tech editor
Milo Yiannopoulos, who since 2012 had been generating an entire career as
a political provocateur out of the toxic cauldron of that online controversy.
Ostensibly a debate over the ethics of online-gaming journalism, in the
fever swamps of Internet message boards, video chat rooms, and news
comments sections, it turned mostly into an attack on feminists, especially
those in the game-design community, featuring threats and at-home
harassment and “doxxing,” in which all of your personal information—your
address, your Social Security number, everything—is published online for
everyone in the world to see. It also became a recruiting ground for white
nationalists and neo-Nazis and played an essential role in generating what
became known as the “alt-right.”
Davis’s Gamergate video came to Yiannopolous’s attention after he was
adopted by a kind of feeder blog called The Ralph Retort, which specialized
in right-wing conspiracism. Ethan Ralph, the site’s founder and editor,
began running Davis’s videos and posts along with effusive praise for his
“insanely good” research skills. He gave him the title of “senior political
analyst” and wrote that “The things he’s saying are true” and praised his
“tireless efforts” and for being “proven right again.”
Yiannopoulos snapped him up in late 2015 and added him to his
“Project Milo” team. Davis worked as a speechwriter and ghostwriter on
Milo’s autobiography, Dangerous, the winter and spring of 2016. The
problem was that Milo wasn’t paying him. He wasn’t paying anyone, for
that matter; much of his organization was actually being operated by
“volunteers” who were happy to be in his orbit and perform work for no
pay.6 At least, Milo seemed to think they were happy. Lane Davis wasn’t.
He asked Milo for a paying position in February. He got turned down. So in
March, he handed a pile of emails to a BuzzFeed reporter, Joseph Bernstein,
who turned them into a story exposing how Yiannopoulos was running a
scam operation that ripped off the people working for him.
 Milo did manage to land Davis a job at the right-wing Capital Research
Center, praising him as “One of my most gifted researchers. Total
autodidact . . . hugely smart.”
Davis wrote a piece attacking the MacArthur Foundation that was
published in May 2017 under a joint Yiannopoulos-Davis byline titled
“MacArthur’s Thought Police: A Foundation Helps Twitter and Other
Social Media Enforce Left-Wing Ideology.”
By then, however, Davis had moved on. Working more feverishly than
ever for The Ralph Retort, he began pouring out videos focusing on the so-
called Pizzagate conspiracy theory, as well as a handful of associated
conspiracies. One of these turned up at Alex Jones’s Infowars website under
a Ralph Retort byline (headlined “Big Brother: Top Soros Henchman Calls
for Government-Run Social Media in Order to Stop Infowars and
Breitbart”) in May also. This meant he was rising steadily within the
conspiracy theory ecosystem.
He had become increasingly obsessed with the conspiracy theory that
there was a global pedophilia ring operating out of Washington and
Hollywood that was the underpinning of the Pizzagate claims, which were
predicated on emails stolen from Democratic National Committee (DNC)
headquarters in 2016.7 (Theorists claim that some of the emails contained
secret code words indicating that there were children being held in a
dungeon in a D.C. pizza parlor. In December 2016, one of the believers in
these theories walked into that restaurant with an AR-15 and fired some
rounds into a closet door he believed would reveal the opening to the
dungeon rather than the janitorial supplies it contained.)
Lane often veered into violent, threatening language when discussing
the supposed pedophilia ring. In a three-way video conversation with fellow
Ralph Retort participants, he became enraged when one of them opined that
same-sex restrooms were harmless. Lane accused him of hoping to spy on
young girls in public facilities.
“Pedo Marxist piece of shit!” Lane screamed. “I’ll stab your bitch ass if
I ever see you.”
Summer was getting into full swing on Samish Island, but Lane spent
most of his time on his computer, creating and posting videos, nearly all of
them variations on the Pizzagate theories, including a related theory that the
unsolved death of a DNC staff member named Seth Rich was part of the
lethal coverup of the pedophilia ring. Lane also posted a video arguing that
all progressives and liberals were participants in the global pedophilia
phenomenon.
“But what if I were to tell you that pedophilia is a basic tenet of the
progressive ideology? You think hyperbole?” he told his audience. “Let’s
look to Germany, where the modern progressive ideology based on social
sciences has its roots. In 2010, Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper published
a three-part series on ‘The Sexual Revolution in Children.’ Part 1 was titled,
‘How the Left Took Things Too Far.’ Quote: ‘Germany’s left has its own
tales of abuse. One of the goals of the German 1968 movement was the
sexual liberation of children. For some time, this meant overcoming all
sexual inhibitions, creating a climate in which even pedophilia was
considered progressive.’ . . . They felt they were doing nothing wrong, it
was just scientific, progressive social science.”8
There was a growing contempt and anger in his voice. He was primed
and ready to explode.
Chapter 1

CONSPIRACIES AND
THEORIES

[T]oday we live in a society in which spurious realities are

manufactured by the media, by governments, by big
corporations, by religious groups, political groups. . . . So I
ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we
are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very
sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic
mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their
power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power:
that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I
ought to know. I do the same thing.
—Philip K. Dick, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t
Fall Apart Two Days Later”

The term “conspiracy theory” means many things—a technical definition

might run something like “a hypothetical explanation of historical or
ongoing news events comprised of secret plots, usually of a nefarious
nature, whose existence may or may not be factual”—but in recent years, it
also has become a kind of dismissive epithet.
Once a narrative takes on the taint of “conspiracy theory,” the common
response nowadays is to dismiss it out of hand as useless, if amusing,
misinformation. (Unless you have been “red-pilled.” Then, it’s a very
different story. Much more about all that momentarily.)
The majority of us who live well inside the mainstream of American
society don’t really have the time for conspiracist beliefs and the wild-eyed
ranters who peddle them—shouters like Alex Jones and Michael Savage,
the cartoonish scam peddlers whose mark on their true believers usually
presages a kind of pathetic gullibility. (What’s in those expensive vitamin
supplements anyway?) We may count their marks among our friends, but
their credibility is always . . . suspect, you know?
There’s a problem, though. Real conspiracies do exist—and have
through most of civilized history. In recent years, one need only point to an
array of scandals—Watergate, which brought down an American president,
or the COINTELPRO episode in which federal agents unleashed dirty tricks
on American citizens for political reasons,1 or the Reagan-era Iran-Contra
scandal in which a web of conspirators shuttled money and weapons
between Central America and the Middle East2—to demonstrate that
conspiracies continue to weave their way into the fabric of American
history. And truth be told, conspiracies as well as wild-eyed beliefs about
them are deeply wired into our history and our national psyche.
A belief in conspiracy theories, more deeply, is reflected in very real
problems in modern corporate-controlled media. After the American public
eventually became aware that it had been gulled into supporting a travesty
of a war in Iraq—an invasion of a foreign nation under the false pretenses
that it possessed weapons of mass destruction—and more acutely realized
the role that major journalistic institutions, including the New York Times
and the Washington Post, played in foisting that deception on them, at great
cost to the families of the soldiers lost there, a widespread mistrust of
previously authoritative sources of information became not just a normal
response, but a perfectly logical one.
Simultaneously, there’s also become an increasing tendency to willingly
consume and absorb conspiracy theories for generally partisan motivations.
The so-called birther theories about Barack Obama’s birth certificate
circulated—and enjoyed a peculiarly obdurate half-life long beyond the
expiration of any trace of factual grounding for the claims—primarily
among partisan conservative Republicans. Donald Trump’s defenders insist
a Communist/globalist/far-left plot exists to remove him from the
presidency for his multiple abuses of power with nothing but odd
speculation about a “deep state” to support it.3
It’s easy to dismiss discussion of actual conspiratorial behavior as
conspiracy theories, especially in this environment. Recall, for instance,
how discussion of the Bush family’s dynastic wealth and its distant history
of involvement with financing the war machinery of the Third Reich during
the tenure of George W. Bush (2001–2008) was dismissed as “conspiracy
theories” by mainstream conservatives, despite the factual grounding of the
discussion4 and the reality that the underlying subject—namely, the growth
of wealth inequality and the concentration of power that resulted5—has
remained a significant and very real issue on the American political
landscape. Likewise, attempts to confront the involvement of Donald
Trump’s presidential campaign with Russian intelligence’s interference in
the 2016 election are still routinely dismissed as conspiracy theories and
“fake news.”
Indeed, “fake news” has become the more recent variation of this hall-
of-mirrors distortion of journalism and the stream of factual information,
one in which some of the most potent misinformation being injected into
that stream deliberately is the claim that factually accurate information is
false. It’s a parlor trick that Donald Trump has mastered in his attempts to
create chaos in the news coverage around his presidency, dismissing fact-
checked New York Times investigative pieces as “fake” while embracing
entirely false narratives about everything from immigrants at the border to
Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
The environment that is most conducive to conspiracy theories, at least
initially, is one in which government operates with broad secrecy and in fact
engages in deliberate deception and obfuscation, usually for short-term
political motives rather than long-term nefarious intentions, but the latter
instead becomes the preferred explanation. The government’s handling of
the unidentified flying objects phenomenon in the 1950s and 1960s is a
classic example of the dynamic at work, producing a whole mini-universe
of conspiracy theories about alien visitors and spacecraft that became such
widespread cultural lore that they created whole genres of science fiction
and fiction as well as in movies and television shows that indeed remain
with us today, more popular than ever.
From this environment can emerge something unique to twenty-first-
century America: an inability to determine, let alone agree upon, what is
factual and real and what is not. This kind of chaotic soup is a prime
environment for conspiracy theories to blossom like kudzu.
This sea change—the unmooring of even conspiracy theories from any
kind of factual grounding whatever—has its origins in the conspiracy
theory cottage industry that sprang up around the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001. There was no shortage of speculation, suspicion, and
questioning in the weeks immediately following the attacks, but even as it
became established that they were the work of militant Islamists led by
Osama bin Laden, fresh conspiracy theories began suggesting that the
attacks were the product of an “inside job,” perpetrated by the Bush
administration, perhaps with the help of Israeli intelligence. The leader of
this contingent, of course, was Alex Jones.
But these theories found an eager audience in no small part because the
Bush administration attempted to stonewall efforts to investigate the
disaster and, particularly, to form an official commission to examine its
causes. From the outset, the White House put its thumb on the panel’s
scales by limiting its purview to the preparedness and response to the
attacks, and in the end, the commission’s report was completely lacking in
any discussion of pre-attack warnings and the administration’s response to
it or lack thereof.6
The Bush White House all along was hostile to the commission,
controversially naming Henry Kissinger its chair before he stepped down,7
refusing to provide it with adequate funding and cooperation,8 and then
finally refusing additional time for the commission to complete its report.9
Most of all, the report gave a truncated and, it soon emerged, entirely
inaccurate accounting of the warnings the administration had received prior
to the attacks. Some of this was because the White House refused to give
key documents—especially the key presidential daily briefing of August 6,
2001, which included stark warnings of an imminent al-Qaeda attack—to
the commission until late in its investigation.10
All of this led many millions of people to believe that the commission’s
final report was less than a full accounting of what happened, with
reasonable cause. Most likely the whole point of the White House’s secrecy
was to cover what was later exposed (particularly by former National
Security Director Richard Clarke, a few years after the fact) as its startling
incompetence in responding to the clear and specific warnings it received
before the attacks. But the coverup created a monster in which millions of
people became susceptible to the broad menu of increasingly warped
conspiracy theories about what really happened on 9/11.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
—Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

Sorting out good information from bad has become seemingly an

overwhelming task in the age of the Internet and social media. Some people
have stopped trying. Others have embraced the abyss, as it were, by diving
into the epistemologically malleable and manipulable world of conspiracy
theories, a zone where normative rules of evidence and factuality need not
apply.
Entering this zone can seem like wandering into a hall of mirrors
designed by Philip Dick, in which it’s difficult to distinguish reality from a
kind of upside-down alternative universe where the rules of gravity are
suspended. Some people veer sharply away, instinctively recognizing its
toxicity, and avoid it altogether. Some wander into the hall of mirrors and
never come out. Or, using a more popular metaphor, they vanish down the
White Rabbit’s gaping black hole.
This maze can be challenging enough for a person with balanced mental
health and reasonable acuity. When persons dealing with mental illness
enter into the conspiracy-theory alternative universe, there can be actual
cognitive effects with extremely undesirable outcomes—making it difficult
at times to ascertain what actions are fueled by conspiracy theories and
which are products of mental illness.
What’s incontestable, however, is that conspiracy theories have a
powerfully toxic effect on people’s sense of connectedness to others—to the
point that many people drawn down those rabbit holes begin to cut off and
fall away from all the friends and family with whom they once were close.
Some of this is the logical product of the overarching narrative of
conspiracy theories in general—namely, that ordinary people are up against
forces so dark and nefarious and omnipotent that they have no real chance
against them.
It convinces them that ordinary democratic participation—their votes,
their caucusing, their phone-banking—is a joke. That you can’t know who
you can trust. Even your neighbors, your family, your old pals might be part
of the conspiracy, if not its “sheeple” dupes. Eventually the logic of the
conspiracist universe would have its adherents disconnect from all human
contact and retreat to a cabin in the Montana woods.
Yet as harrowing and confusing as it can be to enter the world of
conspiracism, it’s actually easier than you’d think to distinguish between a
real conspiracy and a conspiracy theory, beyond recognizing that the former
has a reasonable degree of being real, while the latter is almost certainly a
falsehood intended to scapegoat other people.
Real conspiracies, by their very nature (including their dependence on
secrecy), have three major limitations:

Scope: their purpose is usually to achieve only one or two ends, often
narrow in nature.
Time: their actions necessarily occur within a relatively short time
frame.
Number of participants: all successful conspiracies are the product of
only a handful of people.

As the boundaries of all three of these limits increase, however, the

likelihood of the conspiracy failing or being exposed rises exponentially.
The broader the reach—if it attempts too much—the more likely it is to
meet failure simply as a matter of raw odds and the nature of institutional
inertia. The longer it takes, the greater the risk of exposure, not to mention
the greater the risk of the conspiracy’s components going awry. Similar
issues arise when increasing numbers of people are involved in the
conspiracy: both the likelihood of failure to complete their part of the
conspiracy as well as the growing chances of exposure. And exposure is
fatal to every conspiracy: once the secret is out, it’s no longer a viable plan
of action.
Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, almost universally feature
qualities that contrast sharply with these limits.
 They are broad ranging in nature and frequently boil down to (or play
key roles in) a massive plot to enslave, murder, or politically oppress
all of mankind or at least large numbers of people.
They are believed to have existed for long periods of time, in some
cases for hundreds of years.
They involve large numbers of people, notably significant numbers of
participants in high positions in government or the bureaucracy.
The long-term success of these conspiracies is always credited to
willing dupes in the media and elsewhere.

Moreover, as Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum have explored in

some depth, modern conspiracy theories have evolved sharply in the past
two decades since 9/11 and are no longer what was once their central
feature: evidence based.11 Whereas JFK and UFO conspiracy theories
always revolved around differing interpretations of varying pieces of
evidence, conspiracists in the post-militia era primarily build their work
around pure conjecture, speculation connecting odd factual dots with secret
nefarious plots operating behind the scenes.
This “new conspiracism” represents, as Muirhead and Rosenblum
explain, “a new destructive impulse: to delegitimate democracy”:

The new conspiracism is something different. There is no

punctilious demand for proofs, no exhaustive amassing of
evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close
examination of the operators plotting in the shadows. The
new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation.
Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture: “A lot of
people are saying . . .” Or we have bare assertion:
“Rigged!”—a one-word exclamation that evokes fantastic
schemes, sinister motives, and the awesome capacity to
mobilize three million illegal voters to support Hillary
Clinton for president. This is conspiracy without the theory.12

Conspiracy theories are a problem for healthy democracies not only

because they encourage people to disengage from their communities and
abjure their political franchise by discarding it all as useless, but also
because they represent serious pollution of the information stream.
Democracies rely on robust debate, but that “marketplace of ideas” cannot
function if the debate is founded on falsehoods, smears, and the wild
speculations that all combine to take the place of established facts in any
discourse with conspiracy theorists.
“The new conspiracists seek not to correct those they accuse but to deny
their standing in the political world to argue, explain, persuade, and
decide,” write Muirhead and Rosenblum. “And from attacking malevolent
individuals, conspiracists move on to assaulting institutions. Conspiracism
corrodes the foundations of democracy.”
Even beyond these broad social harms, conspiracy theories also inflict a
host of smaller wounds that eventually have deeper ramifications, as
political researcher Chip Berlet has explained. Among the casualties is a
shared reality and sense of what truth is. “All conspiracist theories start with
a grain of truth, which is then transmogrified with hyperbole and filtered
through pre-existing myth and prejudice,” Berlet writes.13

Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.
—Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

In some ways, conspiracism is an understandable if not entirely rational

response to conditions in the real world, particularly perfectly rational
concerns about the quality and veracity of an information stream produced
by a corporate-owned media apparatus. Moreover, those concerns are
underscored when corporations and their figureheads are in fact caught
conspiring to obtain political or profitable outcomes with some regularity.
“Conspiracist thinking and scapegoating are symptoms, not causes, of
underlying societal frictions, and as such are perilous to ignore,” says
Berlet.14 Indeed, one of the perils is that when legitimate grievances go
unaddressed, the response of the aggrieved can be transformed to embrace
illegitimate means, including violence.
Eventually, all conspiracism is a form of scapegoating, because all
conspiracy theories construct narratives that blame specifically named
targets (sometimes individuals, sometimes groups of people or even whole
ethnicities and religions). And as Berlet observes: “Scapegoating and
conspiracist allegations are tools that can be used by cynical leaders to
mobilize a mass following. Supremacist and fascist organizers use
conspiracist theories as a relatively less-threatening entry point in making
contact with potential recruits.”15
The toxicity unleashed by conspiracy theories—even when they do not
center on Jews, people of color, members of the LGBT community, Muslim
refugees, or other scapegoated groups—can create an environment where a
panoply of bigotry, including misogyny, gay bashing, and anti-Semitism can
flourish within our communities, often expressed as inchoate hate crimes
and terroristic violence.
This gets to perhaps the most toxic aspect of conspiracism: it has a
uniquely unhinging quality. Regardless of the direction of the theories, right
or left or utterly idiosyncratic, the absorption of such beliefs into their
worldview has a singular ability to separate people from their contact with
reality.
In the real world, this means that angry young white men having
romantic difficulties can blame a feminist conspiracy for ruining the world
(as well as their video games) before embarking on killing rampages. It
means another white man who has succumbed to conspiracy theories about
black crime in America can walk into a church and systematically kill black
congregants. It means a gun fanatic can come to believe that mowing down
country music fans at a Las Vegas festival would somehow awaken
Americans to the threat of a government conspiracy to take away their guns.
It means young men living in their parents’ homes can come to believe their
own family members are participants in the conspiracies they loathe and
fear and to strike out violently with swords and knives and guns.
As Berlet says: “People who believe conspiracist allegations sometimes
act on those irrational beliefs, which has concrete consequences in the real
world.”16
So what can we do about it?
The answer is complicated.
Chapter 2

THE RED PILLED

Stephen Paddock didn’t have a lot of friends. Those who knew him, though,
all agreed that he had a thing about guns and the Second Amendment and a
deep fear that the government would attempt to take them away.
They just didn’t expect him to commit, on October 1, 2017, the worst
mass shooting in American history.
Like most men of his generation—Paddock attended high school and
college in California in the 1970s—Paddock was drawn into the world of
conspiracy theories not through the Internet or social media, but from the
alternative media ecosystem that emerged in the 1990s associated with the
“Patriot” militia movement. These earlier conspiracists’ main media then
was the radio, including a variety of guerrilla broadcasts on underground
networks, as well as mailings and email exchanges as the chief forms of
communication.
Guns were the essence of the militia movement—most of its
participants had multiple weapons and considerable stockpiles of
ammunition. They showed them off to each other, and gun shows, which
attracted a significant contingent of paranoid and suspicious people, were
often where the militias themselves organized. Timothy McVeigh, the
Patriot militiaman who killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in April 1995
with a large truck bomb, made a living for years traveling to gun shows and
selling wares there. He would hand out copies of the white-supremacist
race-war tract, The Turner Diaries, to people who bought guns out of the
back of his car from him.1
It was this deep paranoia about the government confiscating their guns
—set off by Bill Clinton’s ill-fated ban on assault weapons passed in 1994
—that was the meat and potatoes of what Patriot militiamen talked about,
organized around, and prepared for. This fear in turn launched the career of
the greatest megastar of the conspiracy-theory universe, Alex Jones.2
Many of the people who were radicalized by conspiracy theories in the
1990s never lost their conviction that there was a nefarious New World
Order plot to enslave mankind. Among them was Stephen Paddock.3
When Adam Le Fevre, an Australian man who was in a relationship
with the sister of Paddock’s girlfriend, visited Paddock’s suburban Las
Vegas home in 2013, he was given a tour of the place, including the gun
room.4
“Steve said ‘bedroom . . . sitting room . . . and gun room . . .’ Aah, gun
room?” Le Fevre later told an interviewer.
The two of them got into a discussion about guns, and when Le Fevre
expressed some skepticism about the need for Second Amendment
protection of gun ownership, Paddock became emphatic.
“I raised that question with Steve and it’s something that he came back
at me with an incredible degree of vigor,” Le Fevre recalled. “He was very
strict and very firm on the fact that it’s a right. It’s the freedom of every
American to participate, to own a gun and use it . . . when need be.”
What most of his friends didn’t know about Steve Paddock was that his
father was one of the longest sought names on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted
list, having escaped prison in Texas in 1969 and remaining uncaught until
1977. Though he had little contact with his father for most of his life (the
old man died of a heart attack in 1998), they shared a set of personality
traits: both men were described as highly intelligent, arrogant, and
egotistical.5
People who knew Paddock in high school said that he was “a real brain”
and “extremely smart,” but also self-absorbed and narcissistic.6 After
getting a degree in business administration at Cal Northridge in 1977, he
went to work as a postal carrier, then at the Internal Revenue Service, where
he was an agent until 1984.
 Family members later told reporters that part of his motivation for being
a federal employee involved his desire to avoid paying taxes, which he
loathed deeply: he “worked for the IRS in order to learn how to hide his
income,” his brother said.7
Multiple people, including a real estate broker with whom Paddock had
dealings, described how he hated the government and hated paying taxes to
it, even moving property ownership from California to Nevada in order to
avoid them.8 This did not change over the years: Adam Le Fevre described
to another correspondent how Paddock was “animated about the
government and the tax system” and “outspoken about the inadequacies and
waste of the government.”9
Though his behavior is consistent with a follower, it’s unclear whether
Paddock participated in the radical anti-tax movement of the 1970s and
1980s. This movement was affiliated with the conspiracist far right of the
time, and many of its tenets and participants were foundational in
establishing the Patriot militia movement of the ’90s. Although it’s likely he
was exposed to the ideology, there is no evidence Paddock joined any of the
anti-tax organizations of that period.
Telling people that he had figured out how to play gambling odds in a
way that could sustain an income, Paddock quit work in 1984 and lived off
his considerable real estate investments and gambling winnings. He began
leading a more leisurely lifestyle, taking overseas cruise ship tours, settling
into communities in Texas, California, and Florida before moving to the Las
Vegas exurb of Mesquite in 2015.
Something went wrong with his finances in September 2015, according
to Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, who told reporters later that
Paddock—who was profiled by experts as a narcissist obsessed with being
part of the Las Vegas elite—lost “a significant amount” of money in his
investments that month.10
He also began collecting guns and became increasingly paranoid about
them. (Apparently he was also a fan of Donald Trump: “He was happy with
Trump because the stock market was doing well,” Lombardo noted.)
Between October 2016 and the same month a year later, he purchased fifty-
five weapons, most of them rifles, to complement what was already an
arsenal of twenty-nine guns. Paddock also had a girlfriend, but in mid-
September 2017, he sent her to her home country of the Philippines on a
family visit—a surprise trip he sprang on her. When she arrived, he wired
her $100,000 to buy a home there.11
At one point, he began scouting locations for what he had in mind. He
visited several hotels overlooking popular music festivals, including what
would have been the venue for the Lollapalooza rock music festival in
Chicago.12
Back in Las Vegas, however, he had apparently taken up with a
prostitute who later spoke on condition of anonymity. She told investigators
she “would spend hours drinking and gambling in Las Vegas” with a
“paranoid” and “obsessive” Paddock. “Mikaela,” as the twenty-seven-year-
old escort named herself, said Paddock would “often rant about conspiracy
theories including how 9/11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government.”13
Late in September, another witness told police she saw a man
resembling Stephen Paddock with another white male at a Vegas restaurant
three days before the shooting.14 Both of them were ranting back and forth
about the 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge and the 1993 Waco siege, both
important martyrdom dates for Patriot militiamen (McVeigh later told
authorities the Oklahoma bombing was revenge for those two events).
These comport with a third unconfirmed witness’s tale. This man—a
former chef who was in the county lockup on a petty crime charge at the
time of the mass shooting—told police he and Paddock had met at a Bass
Pro Shop in Las Vegas two weeks before. The man offered to sell Paddock
the schematics for making an auto sear: the kind of specialized mechanism
that converts a rifle from semiautomatic to automatic, turning an AR-15
into a machine gun capable of mowing down crowds.
The chef described how Paddock would carry on about “antigovernment
stuff” that included FEMA camps and Hurricane Katrina. “He asked me if I
remembered Katrina,” he said. “That was just a dry run for law enforcement
and military to start kickin’ down doors and . . . confiscating guns,” the man
quoted Paddock as saying.15
If this account is accurate, it is probably not a coincidence that Paddock
had been stocking guns throughout the year preceding October 1, 2017. The
2016 hurricane season had been the worst on record, and the 2017 season
was anticipated to be even worse (as indeed it was).
“He was kind of fanatical about this stuff; I just figured he’s another
Internet nut, you know, watching too much of it and believing too much of
it,” said the man.
 The deal fell apart, though, because Paddock wanted the man not just to
sell him the plans, but to actually make the auto sears for him. He offered
him $500. The man turned him down, saying: “I’m too old to spend the rest
of my life in federal prison.” Paddock wasn’t interested in the schematics.
He did, however, try to explain his motivations to the chef: “Somebody
has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves.
“Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”16

________

Conspiracy theories are the one constant thread that runs through the
backgrounds of every right-wing American domestic terrorist of the past
half-century.
In 1984, the notorious neo-Nazi terrorist gang The Order went on a six-
month criminal rampage in which they robbed banks and armored cars by
the dozen, counterfeited money, and assassinated a radio talk-show host in
Denver before being brought to ground by the FBI. They believed that
white people were the victims of a nefarious Jewish cabal secretly running
the government and the media, calling it ZOG, the Zionist Occupation
Government.17
Timothy McVeigh believed a “New World Order” cabal was plotting to
deprive Americans of their guns and round them up into concentration
camps and that federal raids on right-wing extremists at Ruby Ridge, Idaho,
and in Waco, Texas, were proof of that. He killed 168 people with a truck
bomb outside the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.18
Eric Rudolph believed in a similar conspiracy theory, but with a decided
religious twist in which abortion played a central role. Rudolph set off a
backpack bomb at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, then pipe-bombed
women’s health clinics and a gay bar before leading authorities on a three-
year manhunt in the North Carolina woods.19
These are only the most notorious examples. Right-wing domestic
terrorism in fact has been occurring at a steady but muted pace for most of
the past three decades, embodied by armed standoffs and police officer
shootings by so-called sovereign citizens (who believe in a convoluted but
arcane and heavily document-oriented conspiracist version of government).
Nearly all of these terrorists were recruited into their belief systems through
relatively traditional means of recruitment—namely, exposure to printed
material, underground radio broadcasts, and face-to-face interpersonal
proselytization, sometimes in the context of an organization. Rudolph was
raised within an extremist Christian Identity church. Many of the terrorists
were originally radicalized as members of the conspiracist John Birch
Society.
Anders Breivik, however, was a different breed of domestic terrorist. A
new breed. He was the first real Internet age terrorist.
Although the ideology that fueled Breivik’s violence—eliminationist
white supremacism—was what he had in common with those earlier
terrorists, Breivik was very much a child of the Internet. He was mostly
radicalized online. On the day he murdered seventy-seven people, he
published online a fifteen-hundred-page manifesto, complete with video
and multiple links, to the mostly American Islamophobes and white
nationalists whose ideas he had absorbed.
Breivik grew up in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, a child of divorced
parents who was raised by a mother who, according to one child
psychologist who treated him as a child in the 1980s, “sexualized” him and
berated him, telling him she wished he’d never been born.20 As a teenager
he dabbled in hip-hop culture and became a street graffiti artist, which got
him into trouble with the law.21 When he tried to join the Norwegian army,
he was deemed “unfit for service” during the vetting process.22
In his early twenties, he would later claim, he embarked on a long-term
plan to commit an act of terrorism.23 In 2002, at the age of twenty-three, he
founded a computer programming business that eventually earned him
several million kroner. He moved back in with his mother after suffering
financial setbacks, though he still retained a large nest egg of two million
kroner, which he used to proceed with his plan.
In 2009, Breivik bought a farm operation in rural Hedmark County that
mainly grew fresh produce of various kinds.24 He moved to the farm, which
had a small house on the acreage, in June 2011, and began buying lots of
ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Being a farmer gave him cover.
The neighbors thought there was something “off” about Breivik. One
described him as a “city dweller who wore expensive shirts and who knew
nothing about rural ways.” Still, there was nothing exceptional about him.
They didn’t know that over the past year he had been assembling a
private arsenal of weapons, including a Ruger semiautomatic rifle,
purchased legally. Breivik had traveled to Prague in 2010 in an attempt to
purchase illegal guns but backed out when it became too hazardous. He also
bought a Glock handgun.25
In the back of a large white van, he began assembling a classic
McVeigh-style truck bomb: barrels of ammonium nitrate mixed with jet
fuel, carefully stirred, and topped with detonators. It took him, he later said,
a couple of weeks.
On the morning of July 22, he packed everything into the back of the
van, then drove the ninety miles or so to Oslo. Just before he left, he hit
“Send” on his computer, publishing his video on YouTube and launching
his manifesto onto the Internet. He sent it directly via email to more than a
thousand people.
Titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, it rambled on
for fifteen hundred pages of evidence intended to “prove” various
conspiracy theories, all of which established the need for a new “Christian”
crusade in Europe to drive out the invading Muslims.26 It included a wealth
of autobiographical information of often dubious value, though it does
detail how he set out in 2002 with a nine-year plan, as well as how he
trained for his attack on the youth camp by playing the video games Call of
Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and World of Warcraft.
The centerpiece of Breivik’s manifesto was a conspiracy theory:
namely, that the nefarious forces of “cultural Marxism” were colluding to
destroy Western white civilization and to replace white Europeans with a
polyglot population of brown people. Citing a range of mostly American
anti-Muslim ideologues—notably Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, both
of whom he quotes multiple times—he propounds ad nauseam about the
existential threat posed to traditional cultures by the influx of Muslim
immigrants.
“Cultural Marxism” is a standout example of how conspiracy theories
do the work of radical and often toxic political ideologies.27 The general
outline of this conspiracy, according to the progenitors of the theory, is
fairly simple: a group of Jewish academics, all Marxists with a base of
operations at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main—
known as the Frankfurt School—were responsible for concocting the ideas
behind multiculturalism and “Critical Theory,” which they saw as a means
for translating Marxist ideals into cultural values. During the 1930s, the
story goes, they moved from Frankfurt to New York and Columbia
University, and their influence became so profound that it now dominates
both academia and modern popular culture.
Indeed, as they tell it, nearly all of the modern expressions of liberal
democratic culture—feminism, the civil rights movement, the ’60s
counterculture movement, the antiwar movement, rock and roll, and the gay
rights movement—are eventually all products of the scheming of this cabal
of Jewish elites.28
In reality, although the influence of the Frankfurt School is generally
viewed by most political scientists to have had a considerable range within
academia, especially regarding Critical Theory, this school of thought was
directly in opposition to the theories promoted by “postmodernists,” who
are frequently themselves identified by right-wing ideologues as leading
examples of “cultural Marxism.”29 Nor were its members leaders of any
kind of international conspiracy to destroy Western civilization. Contrary to
the characterizations of the conspiracy theorists, most of the “cultural
Marxists” of the Frankfurt School were sharply critical of the modern
entertainment industry,30 which they saw not as a tool for their own
ideology but as a kind of modern “opiate of the masses” that was
antithetical to their values.31
Moreover, multiculturalism was not the product of Critical Theory but
has much deeper roots in the study of anthropology, dating back to the turn
of the twentieth century.32 It became ascendant as a worldview in the post–
World War II years after it became apparent (especially as the events of the
Holocaust became more widely understood) that white supremacy—the
worldview it replaced—was not only inadequate but a direct source of
wholesale evil. The people who are widely recognized as the founders of
multiculturalism—particularly such anthropologists as Franz Boas and
Margaret Mead—were not members of the Frankfurt School (though both
were affiliated with Columbia), and their work had long preceded the war.
The idea of “cultural Marxism” as a plot to destroy the West originated
with a handful of far-right thinkers in the 1990s.33 One of these was the
conservative Jewish intellectual Paul Gottfried, who claimed in later years
that he had identified with the right-wing bloc of the Frankfurt School and
had first complained about cultural Marxism as an insider.34 Gottfried (who
is also credited with having helped coin the phrase “alt-right”)35 engaged in
a debate with paleo-conservative William S. Lind, an associate of far-right
godfather Paul Weyrich and his Free Congress Foundation,36 questioning
whether or not such thinkers could be properly labeled Marxists. Lind
concluded that they could and should be (Gottfried disagreed).
In short order, Lind began developing a cottage industry around his
“cultural Marxism” theory, promoting the idea on the Internet, in speeches,
and in videos. “Cultural Marxism is a branch of western Marxism, different
from the Marxism-Leninism of the old Soviet Union,” he wrote. “It is
commonly known as ‘multiculturalism’ or, less formally, Political
Correctness. From its beginning, the promoters of cultural Marxism have
known they could be more effective if they concealed the Marxist nature of
their work, hence the use of terms such as ‘multiculturalism.’”37
Eventually, Lind propounded on the topic at a Holocaust denial
conference in 2003, where he explained to the audience pointedly: “These
guys were all Jewish.”38
Weyrich, who had already promoted the idea of “cultural conservatism,”
also heavily promoted the idea, presenting it as the subject of a speech he
gave in 1998 to the Civitas Institute’s Conservative Leadership Conference:
“Cultural Marxism is succeeding in its war against our culture. The
question becomes, if we are unable to escape the cultural disintegration that
is gripping society, then what hope can we have?”39
This became the cornerstone in Weyrich’s call for conservatives to join
in a “culture war” against liberals, joining the ranks of such
paleoconservatives as Patrick Buchanan, the former presidential candidate
who in 1992 had originally issued a call for such a “culture war” at the
Republican National Convention.40
Beginning in 2000, Buchanan picked up Lind and Weyrich’s idea and
ran with it, incorporating his attacks on “cultural Marxism” in his writings,
and began giving a number of interviews in which he laid all of the world’s
ills at its feet. In his 2001 book The Death of the West: How Dying
Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and
Civilization, Buchanan described it as a “regime to punish dissent and to
stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy. Its
trademark is intolerance.”41
The book ascribes nearly superhuman powers to Critical Theory. “Using
Critical Theory, for example, the cultural Marxist repeats and repeats the
charge that the West is guilty of genocidal crimes against every civilization
and culture it has encountered,” Buchanan averred. “Under Critical Theory,
one repeats and repeats that Western societies are history’s greatest
repositories of racism, sexism, nativism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-
Semitism, fascism and Nazism. Under Critical Theory, the crimes of the
West flow from the character of the West, as shaped by Christianity. . . .
Under the impact of Critical Theory, many of the sixties generation, the
most privileged in history, convinced themselves that they were living in an
intolerable hell.”
In addition to Buchanan and the paleoconservatives, the theory was also
quickly adopted by white nationalists who began promoting the theory
assiduously. The most notable of these was the far-right publisher Roger
Pearson, a retired anthropologist and prominent eugenicist.42 Besides
numerous eugenicist and supremacist books and journals, he published a
book in 2006 by Frank Ellis titled Marxism, Multiculturalism, and Free
Speech that laid out the basics of the cultural Marxism theory and claims.
Ellis, a former Leeds University professor, claimed that “political
correctness” could be traced to Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong and that it
was designed as an attack on the principles of free speech.
Other white nationalists, notably Jared Taylor of American
Renaissance,43 academic Kevin MacDonald,44 and Peter Brimelow of
VDare, likewise made discussion of “cultural Marxism” central to their
arguments. Taylor railed against it and multiculturalism at a Council of
Conservative Citizens convention in 1999. MacDonald discussed “cultural
Marxism” at length in his book Culture of Critique and discusses it
frequently in interviews and in his magazine, Occidental Observer.45
Brimelow mentioned the concept as early as 2003 and, all the way through
2017, was blaming it for the world’s ills, including the cancellation of a
VDare conference.46
It also gained wide play among right-wing conspiracy theorists led by
Alex Jones, who featured guest conspiracist Alan Watt on air during a 2010
show. Watt told Jones: “People really have lost a sense of dignity and self-
respect and definitely a common culture. That was part of the deep massive
Communist move for multiculturalism. It wasn’t to be nice to other
cultures, it was to help you destroy your own cohesive majority.”47
“Get rid of all other cultures and replace it with a corporate Borg
culture,” Jones surmised.
However, the concept also began moving into the mainstream of the
conservative movement as early as 2008, mainly due to the contributions of
Andrew Breitbart, the founder of the online news organization Breitbart
News.
In his autobiography Righteous Indignation, Breitbart described his
discovery, in about 2007, of “cultural Marxism” as his “awakening.” He
told an interviewer in 2012, shortly before his death, that the concept was
like “putting the medicine in the sherbet. . . . My one great epiphany, my
one a-ha moment where I said, ‘I got it—I see what exactly happened in
this country.’”48
Breitbart began holding forth at length in various venues about the evils
of “cultural Marxism.” He appeared on Fox News and told Sean Hannity
and his audience: “For much of the latter half of the twentieth century,
America dealt with Communism, which was economic Marxism. And what
America was susceptible to during that period of time was cultural
Marxism. Cultural Marxism is political correctness, it’s multiculturalism,
and it’s a war on Judeo-Christianity.”49
After Breitbart’s death in 2012, the news organization bearing his name
continued its tradition of obsession with cultural Marxism; the subject
remains a popular keyword among the website’s writers.
And, obviously, it had gained an ardent believer in Anders Breivik.
“We are sick and tired of feeling like strangers in our own lands, of
being mugged, raped, stabbed, harassed and even killed by violent gangs of
Muslim thugs, yet being accused of ‘racism and xenophobia,’” he wrote.
“As we all know, the root of Europe’s problems is the lack of cultural
self-confidence (nationalism),” he continued. “Most people are still terrified
of nationalistic political doctrines thinking that if we ever embrace these
principles again, new ‘Hitler’s’ will suddenly pop up and initiate global
Armageddon. . . . This irrational fear of nationalistic doctrines is preventing
us from stopping our own national/cultural suicide as the Islamic
colonization is increasing annually . . . You cannot defeat Islamization or
halt/reverse the Islamic colonization of Western Europe without first
removing the political doctrines manifested through
multiculturalism/cultural Marxism.” 50

His plan for doing so, according to the manifesto, entailed other true
believers who also would participate in his “Christian Crusade.” The video
he posted on YouTube contained a plenitude of images of medieval knights
in armor along with references to the “new Crusade.” He claimed that other
members of an organization called the “Knights Templar” were ready to
spring into action with similar terrorist acts elsewhere—though none were
ever named, and in truth none ever came to light.
Breivik saw himself as a white knight out to do his duty to save “his
people.” No doubt that image was in his mind as he drove the little white
van into Oslo the morning of July 22, 2011.

________

Anders Breivik, it later emerged, had had relatively few contacts with other
white nationalist ideologues in real life, though he had exchanged emails
with a number of others, particularly in the European scene. But the largest
source of his inspiration, his manifesto made clear, was material he had
found on the Internet.
This represented a marked shift. Conspiracy theories in the decades
following the Red Scare of the 1950s, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s,
were often spread slowly through organizations ranging from the John
Birch Society to the Ku Klux Klan. People were recruited into the belief
systems usually through exposure to the group’s literature followed by face-
to-face time in organizational meetings.
Some of the radical-right conspiracism of the 1990s was bolstered by
the early stages of the Internet: white supremacist websites such as
Stormfront began creating community spaces for like-minded bigots, and of
course their main content involved a potpourri of conspiracist legends and
theories. The email forwards of the 1990s—usually spurious, anonymous
content alleging all kinds of nefarious behavior by godless liberals and their
politicians—which were shared on listservs and among friends and family
members, were especially effective in spreading conspiracy theories. And
then there were radio shows, many of them “underground” broadcasts, but
others reaching broad audiences like Alex Jones’s show out of Austin,
Texas—shows that specialized in spinning dubious tales of New World
Order conspiracies, which as time went on and Jones’s audience grew
massive, in the 2000s, were renamed globalist plots.51
However, the arrival in the 2000s of a full-on digital culture changed the
path of radicalization. Increasingly, people—young white men especially—
were drawn to conspiracy theories in part because there was a deluge of
them that began hitting the Internet in the latter part of the century’s first
decade, thanks primarily to the arrival of YouTube as a major source of
media consumption, especially for younger users. On YouTube, thanks to
algorithms that encouraged people to find “engaging” content, which often
translated into “outrageously nutty and afactual” in reality, the conspiracy
theories spread like kudzu.
Breivik was one of the first young men to emerge from the spiral of
radicalization that the Internet can uniquely weave into being, and just as he
hoped, his 2011 rampage became a model and inspiration for other young
white men who tried to follow in his footsteps. Like Breivik, the funnel into
which they were drawn was the seductive downward spiral of conspiracy
theories like “cultural Marxism” that lead vulnerable minds down the rabbit
holes of white nationalism and similarly hateful ideologies, including
outright fascism.
Many of those who followed this path of online radicalization were a
good deal younger than Breivik, who was thirty-two at the time he
embarked on his terrorism plot. The archetype that developed was in most
regards more closely embodied in two men who were both in their early
twenties at the time they exploded: Dylann Roof and Elliot Rodger.52
Roof in particular left a social media crumb trail that was at once cryptic
and clear. From his Facebook page, you could see that the twenty-one-year-
old South Carolina man liked to visit historical sites. This was not a healthy
thing: they tended to be sites from the slave-trading era, like Sullivan’s
Island, the largest slave disembarkation port in North America. He had
black friends from school—despite dropping out after ninth grade—but he
also hated black people generically.53
In his manifesto, he called black people “the group that is the biggest
problem for Americans,” but like most white nationalists, he also blamed
nefarious Jews for creating it:

Niggers are stupid and violent. At the same time they have
the capacity to be very slick. Black people view everything
through a racial lense. Thats what racial awareness is, its
viewing everything that happens through a racial lense. They
are always thinking about the fact that they are black. This is
part of the reason they get offended so easily, and think that
some thing are intended to be racist towards them, even
when a White person wouldnt be thinking about race. The
other reason is the Jewish agitation of the black race.54
Roof never joined any organizations, but in addition to spending inordinate
amounts of time playing video games, taking Suboxone, and hanging out in
Columbia with his friends, he also began hanging out on the chat boards at
the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer—where “cultural Marxism” is
conventional wisdom—as well as the old school website of the Council of
Conservative Citizens (CCC).
It was at the latter site that, inspired by the case of Trayvon Martin, the
young black Florida man who was gunned down by a white security guard,
he began reading and absorbing the spurious statistics spewed there about
black crime and particularly its effect on whites: Roof fully believed the
CCC’s assertion that 80 percent of white homicides are committed by black
people. After all, a Google search had told him so.55
A ne’er-do-well whose last job had been a brief stint as a landscaper,
Roof decided he needed to rescue the white race from extermination. That
was why, on June 17, 2015, he set out on his mission, another knight off to
save the world, like Anders Breivik:

I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into

the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most
historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio
of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no
real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet.
Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real
world, and I guess that has to be me.

________

Elliot Rodger, like Breivik and Roof, saw himself in a similarly heroic light,
and likewise wanted to do battle with the forces of “political correctness.”
But his enemy was different: he hated women.56
Rodger was the well-to-do son of a Hollywood producer, and in most
regards a good-looking young man. But he was deeply troubled. Smaller
and slightly frail, he had always been something of a bully magnet in school
and was known to spend his days alone: he later wrote that he “cried by
myself every day.” At Crespi Carmelite High in Los Angeles, he fell asleep
at a desk one day, and other students taped his head to it.
 He expressed himself at Elliot Rodger’s Official Blog and on YouTube,
where he mostly posted angst-ridden expressions of rejection and
loneliness. At home, he received mental-health counseling and drug
treatment by psychiatrists, although he never received a formal diagnosis of
a mental illness.
Rodger also spent inordinate amounts of time online in chat rooms. The
places he liked to dwell the most were some of the darkest corners of the
Internet—in particular, among his fellow dwellers in the online “incel”
culture.
“Incel” is short for “involuntary celibate,” and the young men who
participate in this universe invariably loathe women and feminists and
blame them for the men’s lack of receiving enough sex. Their solution: an
“incel revolution” in which men take back the reins of society from women
and put them back in their place with force. The revolution they envision is,
of course, quite violent.57
After all, the problem in most respects is simple: these are men who for
various reasons have difficulty sustaining a relationship long enough to
have sex (often because they don’t understand that, unlike in the world of
pornography, most women are uninterested in sex with relative strangers).
Put crudely, they can’t get laid and blame women for that. In their view, it’s
owed them.
As incels imagine things, the world is mostly comprised of “Chads”—
sexually competitive males, guys who are chosen for their superiority—and
“Stacys,” the sexually attractive and available women who get to do the
choosing and who always choose Chads. Incels see themselves as noble-
spirited rebels who stand outside that world.
Elliot Rodger was one of these young men. Posting at the misogynist
site PUAHate (“The Forefront of the Anti-Pickup Artist Movement”: this
sector of the misogynist world had repudiated sex altogether), Rodger
mused on both feminism (“If we can’t solve our problems we must destroy
our problems”) and race:

Today I drove through the area near my college and saw

some things that were extremely rage-inducing.
I passed by this restaurant and I saw this black guy
chilling with 4 hot white girls. He didn’t even look good.
 Then later on in the day I was shopping at Trader Joe’s
and saw an Indian guy with 2 above average White Girls!!!
What rage-inducing sights did you guys see today? Don’t
you just hate seeing these things when you go out? It just
makes you want to quit life.58

Rodger’s mother was Chinese, but he saw himself as mostly passing for
white. When an Asian male posted a query about whether a specific pair of
shoes would help him “attract white women,” Rodger responded: “White
girls are disgusted by you, silly little Asian.”
The Asian man replied by posting photos of himself with a white
woman, which set Rodger off: “Full Asian men are disgustingly ugly and
white girls would never go for you. You’re just butthurt that you were born
as an asian piece of shit, so you lash out by linking these fake pictures. You
even admit that you wish you were half white. You’ll never be half-white
and you’ll never fulfill your dream of marrying a white woman. I suggest
you jump off a bridge.”
Like many others in incel culture, he became a seething cauldron of
frustration and anger toward women and feminists, though he often
expressed vitriolic anger toward other men for outcompeting him. At other
times he struck a genteel pose, naming himself “the supreme gentleman”
and “the perfect guy.”
Because the world failed to recognize him, though, he wanted to burn it
all down. At PUAHate, he posted:

One day incels will realize their true strength and numbers,
and will overthrow this oppressive feminist system.
Start envisioning a world where WOMEN FEAR YOU.59

Rodger drove a nice a car, a black BMW. On the evening of May 23,
2014, he walked out of his apartment near the University of California,
Santa Barbara, campus, got into it, and drove away, leaving three dead
roommates behind. He drove to a Starbucks, got some coffee, and sat in the
car, uploading material to the Internet from his laptop.
Specifically, it was a manifesto, titled “My Twisted World: The Story of
Elliot Rodger,” with a meandering explanation for the violence he was
about to commit. He also uploaded a video to YouTube. It was titled
“Retribution.”60
“On the day of retribution,” he told the world, “I am going to enter the
hottest sorority house of UCSB and I will slaughter every single spoiled,
stuck up, blonde slut I see inside there.”

________

Alek Minassian always had issues, even before becoming enmeshed in incel
culture. In high school in Toronto, he was placed in a special needs
program, where he was known for making cat sounds and hugging himself.
Sometimes he tried to bite people, though otherwise was quite “harmless.”61
In college, he studied software development and had an easier time
fitting in as an adult, especially as he was able to cocoon himself in the
more insular world of research technology. And that, seemingly, was when
he was drawn into the world of incels.62
Minassian apparently fell into the culture while visiting the Internet
message board 4chan, a popular website with massive traffic numbers built
around an anything-goes approach to subject matter, including the open
expression and promotion of white nationalist and other far-right beliefs.
The problem is that Minassian never could be identified with any
previous comments or participation on incel threads, either at 4chan or
Reddit (another popular incel gathering site) or websites specifically
dedicated to the culture. Where and how he picked up the ideology is
anyone’s guess.63
In late 2017, he joined the Canadian military but washed out after two
months and sought a voluntary release. Minassian “wasn’t adapting to
military life, including in matters of dress, deportment and group
interactions in a military setting,” a senior military official commented,
noting that “there were no red flags” suggesting concerns about violence.64
The only thing anyone really knows about him is that on April 23, 2018,
he rented a large white Chevrolet Express van from a Ryder agency and
drove it into the heart of downtown Toronto, into the trendy North York
City Centre shopping district on Yonge Street. He apparently parked it long
enough to post a message onto Facebook.
 Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak
to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has
already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys!
All hail Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!

________

Jeremy Christian had issues, too. But like Anders Breivik and Elliot
Rodger, he never received an official diagnosis of mental illness. He was
just, in the vernacular, “troubled.”65
Mostly he was in trouble with the law as a young man. When he was a
fifteen-year-old heavy-metal fan and skateboarder, he was caught breaking
into a Goodwill clothing donation box in downtown Portland, Oregon. The
police released him to his parents and there were no legal penalties. The
next year he dropped out of high school and got a job in a pizza parlor,
where he worked for the next four years, picking up a GED along the way.
He also picked up classes at Portland Community College.
Christian argued with his parents a lot. So, at eighteen, he moved out of
the family home and rented a room from the mother of a friend while
continuing to work at Pietro’s. Then, in 2002, at the age of twenty, it all
went to hell when he decided to rob a convenience store.66
The attempt went sideways from the start, though Christian wore a ski
mask. He threatened the clerk with a .38 revolver, then handcuffed him to a
cigarette rack. Christian made his getaway with $1,000 and armfuls of
cigarette cartons on a bike, and police caught him just a few blocks away,
the ski mask sticking out of a pocket. He pulled out a gun, and the officer
fired at him three times; one of the shots hit him in the right cheek. When
they had him on the ground, he told the cops he wasn’t aiming at them. He
had intended to shoot himself.67
Christian had no criminal record, but he wound up spending the next
seven years in prison, in part because the charges included kidnapping for
handcuffing the clerk.
When he got out in 2010, he apparently fell into the everyday life of
being a homeless street itinerant in downtown Portland. He was known to
trade comics outside Powell’s, the big local bookstore. He was also known
for being loud and a little frightening.68
 On his Facebook page, Christian began posting a variety of conspiracy
theories. His politics swung wildly; he originally favored Bernie Sanders’s
2016 candidacy for the presidency, but after the primaries, he swung to
Donald Trump (for a while, at least) because his loathing for Hillary
Clinton was deep, visceral, and violent. After the election, he ranted:
“Death to Hillary Rodham Clinton and all her supporters!!! To be carried
out by Bernie Supporters who didn’t turn traitor and vote Hillary.”69
As spring 2017 wore on, his posts became more openly violent, deeply
Islamophobic and racist, not to mention voicing a weird obsession with
circumcision, which he connected to a nefarious Jewish conspiracy.
“I want a job in Norway cutting off the heads of people that Circumcize
Babies. . . . Like if you agree!!!” he wrote.
“If you support the cutting of babies genitals in sick tribal rituals in
America get off my page,” went another post. “I don’t care if you are friend
of family.”
A law banning circumcision, he proposed another time, would “stop
True Patriots from having to kill otherwise good doctors inside hospitals.”
“F-- You if you say my body my choice but support circumcision,” he
declared.
Street artist Raymond Alexander, a sixty-eight-year-old black man, had
known Christian for years from the streets. He told Oregonian reporter
Allan Brettman that Christian had talked race with him, but “he didn’t ever
use the master race issue on me.”70
“He went way back to Norway,” Alexander said, “to some secret society
that if they find out about this document that’s never been exposed to the
world then there’s going to be mass chaos throughout the world. . . . [H]e
was tied up in mythology, tied up in Viking blood lines.”
That spring in the Portland area, a group of right-wing extremists who
first organized as a kind of biker militia in nearby Vancouver, Washington,
renamed themselves Patriot Prayer and began organizing pro-Trump street
protests in Portland as a way of asserting their “free speech” rights—usually
in the face of a militant far left/anarchist/black bloc contingent native to the
city. Jeremy Christian was drawn to the conflict like a fly to garbage.
He showed up at one of Patriot Prayer’s first events in Portland on April
29, a kind of street march in which about thirty people carrying American
and Gadsden flags—in addition to the large Trump banner carried by Patriot
Prayer leader Joey Gibson—traveled along a busy thoroughfare in the city’s
southeastern quadrant. A contingent of antifascists accompanied and
taunted them, though no violence broke out.71
But Jeremy Christian got kicked out.
For most of the march he blended in with the other “Patriots”—a large
American flag with the stars replaced by a “1776” logo draped over his
back like a cape, a gray woolen ballcap reading “Wolverines” turned
backward, shouting “Free speech! Free speech!” When they pulled up at a
parking lot, though, Christian started getting into it verbally with some of
the antifascists. He began yelling at one of them: “White nigger! You’re a
white nigger! You are a white nigger!”72
At that point, another “Patriot” intervened. “Hey, no language! No
language!” He told Christian using the “N word” was “not appropriate”:
“Don’t do that!” Christian later told others in the parking that being called a
“Nazi” was “a joke! I’m a nihilist!” he shouted. Then, he started using a
Nazi salute.
An antifascist counterprotester dressed in a clown hat, juggling balls
and telling jokes, approached Christian and joked with him briefly. His
name was Micah David-Cole Fletcher, a twenty-one-year-old Portland State
student, and they would meet again, fatefully, a few weeks later.73
Finally, a larger group of “Patriots” stepped up and told Christian he
was being ejected from the march. He started talking gibberish to them, and
they stopped him: “No! No! You’re giving the Nazi sign, you’re using the N
word! So please go away! I won’t ask you again nicely.”
Christian turned around and shouted to the gathered crowd. “I’m the
only motherfucking free speecher here! Who will defend free speech?”
Police then escorted Christian away from the scene.
Nearly a month later, on a late evening Portland MAX commuter train,
Christian boarded and promptly announced that he was a Nazi and was
looking to recruit others to join him. He shouted that he hated Jews,
Mexicans, Japanese, and anyone who wasn’t Christian.74
A black woman named Demetria Hester—the only person of color on
the train—spoke up and told Christian he needed to keep it down.
“Fuck you Bitch!” he screamed at her, adding that she had neither the
right to speak nor to be on the train.
“I built this country!” he shouted. “You don’t have a right to speak.
You’re black. You don’t have a right to be here. All you Muslims, blacks,
Jews, I will kill all of you.”
 As the train pulled into Demetria Hester’s stop, she stood up to leave.
Christian made clear he intended to get off and began shouting loudly at
everyone on the train that he didn’t care if anyone wanted to call the police
because he wasn’t scared.
“I will kill anyone who stands in my way because I have a right to do
this,” he told them. He looked at Hester and seethed: “Bitch, you’re about
to get it now.”
As she stepped off the train, Christian lunged at her with a Gatorade
bottle and smacked her above the right eye with it just as she whipped out
her can of mace and gave him a faceful. It knocked him down on the
platform. She staggered away and awaited police, who finally arrived about
twenty minutes later. Hester said the officers treated her as a likely suspect,
even though witnesses pointed out Jeremy Christian—still washing pepper
spray out of his eyes—standing feet away.
Christian wound up walking away from the scene and going home for
the night. Police later blamed this on confusion regarding who the
perpetrator was.75
The next day, he boarded another MAX train during rush hour. This
time he had a knife.

________

Buckey Wolfe and his brother James were raised in the same home in
Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood and attended the same local schools, but
they ended up on very different paths. After they graduated high school,
James joined the army and served overseas. Buckey joined the Washington
State Militia and became devoted to conspiracy theories.76
Everyone kind of knew that Buckey had mental-illness problems,
though. He had a jittery, paranoid personality and was on edge a lot.
Eventually, in his early twenties, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and
prescribed medication to cope with it.77
At the same time, he dove headfirst into the far right’s rabbit holes. In
addition to joining a militia group, he also participated in the events and
drinking games with a local chapter of the Proud Boys—the far-right, pro-
Trump, street-brawling organization that had been involved in a number of
ugly riots along the West Coast in 2017 and 2018.
 Wolfe also started watching conspiracy videos on YouTube. Initially, his
video “likes” were a typical teenage boy’s interests—lots of rock videos
plus some fitness and personal motivation material. As he grew older,
though, he was drawn into politics. Initially this came through “alt-lite”
YouTubers, like Hunter Avallone, who specialize in making fun of “social
justice warriors.” Then he started liking weird science conspiracy theories
about “free energy” and “Tesla’s UFO,” before he eventually became a full-
time Alex Jones/Infowars fan. He later told friends that he had “watched
every episode” of Jones on his massive YouTube channel.78
After that, all of Wolfe’s video likes revolved around the far right,
especially Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes and his cohorts, as well as
Milo Yiannopoulos, Steven Crowder, and “Sargon of Akkad,” all figures in
the so-called alt-lite. Unsurprisingly, he then began liking videos from
openly white nationalist sites such as Red Ice.
“I’m a proud Western chauvinist and I refuse to apologize for creating
the modern world,” a Facebook post read, closing with the Proud Boys’
slogan: “Uhuru!!!”
A Facebook post from a Proud Boys member in March 2018 showing
the twenty or so members of the Seattle chapter standing outside a local
light-rail station making the mock-white-nationalist “OK” sign and holding
up a “Trump 45” shirt featured a comment from Buckey Wolfe, who
appears in it: “My face [is] covered by hands lol. Last night was awesome I
had a great time!”
Finally, Wolfe reached the apotheosis of this journey when he became
an ardent supporter of the “QAnon” conspiracy theories—a sort of meta-
conspiracy theory involving Donald Trump, Robert Mueller, Hillary
Clinton, and the same global pedophilia ring featured in Pizzagate. “It’s
coming, and it’s gonna be good!” Wolfe commented on YouTube. “Y’alls
are gonna get your just dues. I will be so happy, you have no idea.”79
While circulating in that world, Buckey also became enamored of David
Icke’s theory positing that world leaders are in fact a species of lizard aliens
from outer space who are able to disguise themselves.
In November 2018, he posted a rant: “If I start talking about the
iluminati and you role your eyes at me you have been successfully
indoctrinated. The ilimunati is VERY real, the CIA agrees with my
asurtion, this is straight from the CIAs website!!! I erge you DO YOUR
RESEARCH BEFORE YOU BLOW ME OFF!!!”
 Two of his fellow Proud Boys chimed in to support him. One replied: “I
didnt believe in Zionist till I watched a rabi speak about rothchilds being
their Zionist leaders.”80
Wolfe’s family became concerned, especially after a long late December
2018 rant that he posted on Facebook about humans being replaced by alien
lizards that ended with a plea not to ignore him. His brother James chimed
in to try to calm him down. An aunt who lived in Ohio asked him if he was
okay but said that she couldn’t understand what he was talking about. This
aunt, who had lost a son the year before, added that she loved him.81
Buckey replied: “I know you don’t cus you’ve been taken, don’t think I
didn’t notice when you got back from your cruise your eyes had changed!!!!
You will be made in to dust lizard!!!!!”

________

Brenton Tarrant had a perfectly unremarkable upbringing in the town of

Grafton, Australia, located south of Brisbane and the Gold Coast in New
South Wales.82 He worked for a few years as a personal trainer after
graduating high school and then began traveling widely.83
Around 2016, at the age of twenty-six, he became obsessed with the
long-simmering conflict between Serbs and Muslims in Kosovo after
visiting the Balkans extensively.84 He began posting Balkan nationalist
material, defending the Serbian military as “Christian Europeans attempting
to remove these Islamic occupiers from Europe,” as he later put it in his
manifesto. Investigators believe that he met far-right extremists in Europe
on his travels and became deeply influenced by them.85
The manifesto explained that he “dramatically changed my views”
between April and May 2017. He felt that a “series of events . . . revealed
the truth of the Wests current situation.” He decided at that time that a
“violent, revolutionary solution” was needed.86
The key event, he said, was the April 7, 2017, truck attack by an
Islamist radical in downtown Stockholm that killed five people and injured
another eleven. Tarrant said he was visiting Western Europe at the time,
playing the tourist in France, Spain, Portugal, and other countries at the
time of the attack. Among the dead was an eleven-year-old girl named Ebba
Akerlund: “Young, innocent and dead Ebba,” he wrote.
 At this point, he said, he began planning his own attack, initially from
his home in Melbourne. Sometime in 2018 he moved to the town of
Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island, just a five-hour drive down the
eastern coast from Christchurch. It’s a quiet town, at one time a famed
whaling station, now best known for its college campuses, with students
accounting for about a fifth of the population.
Tarrant rented a place in the suburb of Andersons Bay. His neighbors
said that he was quiet, polite, and reserved—indeed, they scarcely ever
encountered him in person. No one had any idea he even had guns.87
Like Breivik, whom he celebrated in his manifesto, he was obsessed
with “white genocide” and changes in ethnic demographics. “It’s the
birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. If there is one thing I want
you to remember from these writings, its that the birthrates must change,”
Tarrant wrote. “Even if we were to deport all Non-Europeans from our
lands tomorrow, the European people would still be spiraling into decay and
eventual death.”
However, he claimed he was “not a direct member of any organization
or group, though I have donated to many nationalist groups and have
interacted with many more.”
He said “no group ordered my attack. I make the decision myself.
Though I did contact the reborn Knights Templar for a blessing in support
of the attack, which was given.”
Tarrant’s attitudes about the left were also clear.

To Antifa/Marxists/Communists
I do not want to convert you, I do not want to come to an
understanding. Egalitarians and those that believe in
heirachy will never come to terms. I don’t want you by my
side or I don’t want share power.
I want you in my sights. I want your neck under my boot.
SEE YOU ON THE STREETS YOU ANTI-WHITE
SCUM

He titled the manifesto “The Great Replacement,” and delivered it via

email to thirty recipients at around noon Friday, March 15, 2019. He was in
downtown Christchurch, a good two hours north of Dunedin, sitting in a
car, and he had several guns with him: two semiautomatics, two shotguns,
and a lever-action gun. He also had a GoPro camera strapped to his chest.
Chapter 3

SACRIFICES

There are always those little “sacrifices” that “have to be made” when it
comes to the conspiracist mindset of mass killers. Little people. Ordinary
people. People you and I and everyone else knows, somewhere, who
become their victims.
The killers don’t know these people. To them they are “sheeple,”
hapless pawns in the vast conspiracy ruling the world. They might as well
be conspirators themselves. Maybe some of them are.
Something like that was what Stephen Paddock, whose contempt for the
“sheeple” was remarked by several people who knew him, was thinking the
night of October 1, 2017, as he surveyed the crowd that gathered for the
huge, week-long country music festival taking place next to the Sunset
Strip, right below the suite of rooms he had rented three days before in the
Mandalay Bay hotel.1
It was quite a view. In fact, he could take it in from two entirely
different angles from the two adjoining rooms.

________

At first, Jenna thought someone had tossed out some firecrackers in the
middle of the Jason Aldean performance. An obnoxious drunken guy who
had been annoying the hell out of her suddenly dropped to the ground. She
thought he had just passed out. He hadn’t.2
Then there were more pops, and she could see people falling in front of
her, one after another.
“I don’t know how long it was, but I didn’t put the two together,” she
recalls now. “To me they were separate situations. Someone threw
firecrackers, which was annoying, and then the drunken man fell. And no
one was screaming. I would say people were kind of looking around, but
Jason Aldean did not stop singing.
“And then there was the second part when he shot again, and many
more people fell. You could see the crowd and they looked like little
dominoes going down.
“That’s where Jason Aldean stopped singing.”
Jenna and her childhood friend Sammi were not first timers at the Route
91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas that October 1. They had
attended the same three-night event two years before. In between, Jenna had
given birth to a little blond-haired baby girl, a bright-eyed chip off her
mama’s block, who was now ten months old, and in the care of her
grandmother back home in Tacoma, Washington.
Like Jenna, Sammi had graduated college and moved on to the working
world, too. The week in Vegas had been a chance to taste their old lives
again, maybe one last time. So Jenna left the baby, Camden, with her own
mother, and flew off for an autumn music fling.
“Sam Hunt was who I really wanted to see, and then Eric Church,” she
recalls. “So we had already seen them the previous nights. So Sunday night
we were only there to see Jason Aldean.”
Before the show, they hit a couple of casinos. Sammi’s gambling luck
changed everything and may have saved their lives. “We first went to the
Luxor where there’s this fish game that she just loves,” Jenna recalls. It was
just across Sunset Boulevard from the concert venue.
“She said she just wanted to put $10 in and then we can go over there,
because every night we had gotten up right close to the stage—not that we
could touch him, but maybe four rows back. And $10 turned into $100, and
we were there for over an hour.
“So we showed up probably fifteen minutes before he started, and that’s
why we ended up kind of farther back,” she says.
 Now, people were falling in front of her, some not far away, and the
popping sounds kept coming. “I just kind of looked at Sammi and I was
like, that’s a fucking gun,” she remembers. “Someone’s shooting people.
And it finally occurred to me what we heard thirty seconds prior was a gun,
too, so this is someone shooting, twice now. And I knew it was not like a
pistol. I knew that it was something automatic and big.
“People around us had hit the ground. At that point, everyone kind of
went down. Some people just ducked. Other people had fallen or gotten hit.
“I just went down. Because that’s your human instinct, I guess, to get
closer to the ground.”
Her lifelong friend then probably saved her life again: Sammi made her
get up and flee. “She said, ‘We need to run.’ And I said, ‘I don’t think we
should run.’ And she said, ‘We have to fucking run.’ And I was super
scared. I didn’t want to run because at that point, it seemed like the shooter
was among us, so I didn’t want to run into him. I couldn’t tell—which way
is he coming from?
“People all over are falling, so I don’t know if he’s over by us. Someone
got shot right by us. But then I could see people screaming on the other side
of the stage, so I had no idea where the gunfire was coming from.
“So I said, ‘I don’t think we should run.’ And she said, ‘We will fucking
die here.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’” Jenna got up and they took off away from
the stage, toward the back of the venue.
“Basically the only reason I ran is that she started to. I was like, ‘Well, I
don’t want to die alone, I guess.’”
Ironically, it was mere moments after the two of them start running
away that they were separated. They had played soccer as teammates since
grade school and into high school, and both were good athletes, though
Jenna was known as the slower of the two. Running with the crowd away
from the gunfire to the right and past the concessions, Jenna sprinted
through the pack. “I just booked it a little bit faster I guess,” she says.
A woman who had been running alongside her suddenly took a shot
through the neck in front of Jenna. She “whipped around and went down,”
as though someone had cut the strings on a marionette.
“It was literally like it just went through and whipped her whole body
around and she went down. And I was just thinking, ‘I just have to keep
running, just have to keep running.’”
 She ran outside the venue over a cyclone fence that had been toppled by
panicked concertgoers as they fled. Out on the street, however, she
instinctively took cover behind a five-foot-high transformer that shielded
her momentarily. She pulled out her cell phone and called her mother back
in Tacoma, who promptly picked up.
“After I saw that girl fall, I was like, I’m probably not going to survive
this,” she says. “I don’t even know where I’m running to. So I called her
when I was definitely behind the transformer. And I said, ‘I need you to
take care of Camden. I need you to let her know that I love her.’ And she
was kind of confused: ‘Well, where is the shooter? Or, where’s Sammi?
What’s going on?’
“And I said, “I can’t explain everything but I need you to know this.
And I don’t think I’m going to . . . I don’t know where to go. But I don’t
know if I’ll make it.’ Because at that point I’d seen . . . I mean, there were
just dead bodies everywhere, some of them just when I was running past—I
don’t know if they were dead or just lying there.
“And so it was in mind—I still have a ways to run, to where I don’t
know, or if I’m going to get hit here, but I need to at least get this out of the
way. For me, I just had a real urgency—like any parent, I’m sure—there
was a sense of urgency to tell my mom to take care of Camden. In
hindsight, it’s like, of course she would have. But it was the most important
thing, just to get confirmation that she will take care of her and that she’ll
raise her to know that I loved her.
“And for me, once that was done, I was able to start thinking a little
more clearly. OK, now let’s see if we can survive this.”
Across the street from the transformer was the local Hooters franchise,
and she dashed over to it and inside. That’s when it hit her that Sammi was
not with her and nowhere in sight. So she called her mother again, and told
her she didn’t know where her friend was. But her mother calmly reassured
her: “No, we’ve heard from Sammi.”
“Tell her to come to Hooters, it’s the closest place,” Jenna answered.
Jenna wandered through the first-floor casino at the restaurant, which
was a vacant madhouse of toppled machines and tables. Finally, she found
refuge in a walk-in cooler in the kitchen. What she did not know was that
by this point she was herself drenched in blood from the head down, none
of it her own.
 “So I ran because they were holding the kitchen door open as an access
door, and I ran in and they were kind of shuffling people into the freezer.
And the woman next to me was holding a woman next to her who had a cut
or had been shot. And that was kind of shooting blood, too.” A woman
there asked Jenna where she had been hit; she answered, “I don’t think I’ve
been hit.”
The scene was fraught with the lethal unknown and all the wild
misinformation that accompanies it: Death had descended on all of them
from some place they could not see and they had run, but none of them
believed there was only one gunman. The shots rattled around the plaza and
they came from different angles, and Jenna thought it seemed as though a
team of terrorists was shooting at the crowd. Her perception was widely
shared.
Once inside the restaurant and locked down in the walk-in cooler, the
panic began to set in. Misinformation was running rampant—people inside
the cooler believed there was an active shooter inside the hotel. “Every time
someone came into the kitchen, they thought it might be the shooter and
there was a big commotion,” Jenna recalls. “And that’s when I kind of had a
moment where I could think: ‘OK, if the shooter does come in, we’re all
sitting here like a little bunch of ducks. This isn’t a good hiding spot.’
“So I announced, ‘I’m leaving.’ And I remember, the lady next to me
was kind of motherly. She was, ‘No, you can’t leave, you can’t go out
there.’ And I was, ‘I can’t stay here.’” Jenna left and returned to the vacant
casino floor, trying to find a hiding place.
It turned out that Sammi had hit Hooters running and fled to the upper
floors immediately, finding refuge in one of the rooms on the fourth floor,
and her mother texted Jenna that she could find her friend there. At first she
couldn’t get an elevator because they had stopped working and she was
advised not to take the stairs, but after a while, the elevators returned to
service and she was able to get to the fourth floor.
Jenna ran down the halls screaming her friend’s name: “Sammi!” No
one answered. Then, a man opened his door and told her, “Okay, you need
to get in here. There’s a shooter out there.” Jenna began: “Is my friend in
your room? Her name is Sammi and—” The man stopped her: “No, but you
need to get in here, there is a shooter in this hotel.” So she went in, he
closed the door behind her, and she joined the fifteen or so people who had
already taken refuge in the ordinary little room.
 “Everybody had these injuries, and so all of a sudden these women start
coming up to me and begin taking off my dress and stuff. And I’m like,
‘What are you doing? Stop!’ They’re saying, ‘No, honey, you’ve been hit.
We need to figure out where you’ve been hit. She’s a nurse.’ But I told
them, I haven’t been hit.” They persisted: “You’re in shock, you’ve been
hit.”
“So they take me into the bathroom, and at that point I knew I had been
hit, because I looked in the mirror, and I look like Carrie. There’s blood on
my face and stuff and everywhere else. So suddenly I’m just thinking, OK,
maybe I am hit. Even though it feels like I’ve been down in the lobby for an
hour and I never felt like I was hit.
“And so anyway, they get me in the shower, and they’re literally
spraying me off with my dress on, and I’m thinking, this is lovely.” The
women washed her down and found a wound in her leg—a graze with
flecks of shrapnel in it that they removed and cleaned. But it wasn’t large
enough to have drenched her in blood. The man whose room they were
hiding in gave her some warm socks.
They were safe, but in the swirl of panic and misinformation, the
hysteria became relentless. Someone in the room tied the sheets together so
people could climb down to a courtyard below in the event the shooter
came to their door. Everyone was certain that killers were roaming the
hallways of the Hooters Casino Hotel.
Jenna finally managed to connect with Sammi, who was hiding in
another room on the same floor. Their respective hosts accompanied them
to a halfway point, and then Sammi came back to the room where Jenna had
found refuge.
“And that’s the first time that I felt like we might get through this,”
Jenna says, “because I was sure I’d never see Sammi again, regardless
whether it was her or me. So when I saw her, I felt as though, OK, there
might be the light at the end of tunnel. And so this was probably an hour
and a half in and there was still nothing on the news. And then, finally, we
got the news on the TV and they started to give kind of a report. And that’s
when it felt like, ‘OK, they’re taking care of this.’”
As the night went on, it became evident that the shooting had ceased
and that police had the situation largely under control—not to mention that
much of what they had been hearing throughout the night had been
misinformation that only heightened the chaos. The local media had also
contributed to it, spreading unconfirmed rumors, including a report of
bombs in the basements of the hotels.
“It’s just crazy because really I was only in danger two minutes,
basically. But I felt in danger for three hours . . . just sure I was going to die.
Like saying my goodbyes to my family. In hindsight, I think that’s one of
the hardest parts of the process—realizing you didn’t have to be panicked
for that long.”
The sheer chaos and terror of the scene had spread confusion like
wildfire, including among police, who had great difficulty figuring out
where the gunfire was coming from. There were reports it was coming from
the Luxor casino resort, the great glass pyramid that is next door to both the
Mandalay Bay resort and the concert venue; other reports suggested it was
coming from the festival grounds. Finally, police had observed the flashes
of gunfire that were emanating from the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay
and dispatched a tactical squad to put an end to it.3
Stephen Paddock had already had an encounter with a Mandalay
security guard named Jesus Campos, who had gone to the thirty-second
floor in response to an open-door alert and promptly found he couldn’t enter
through an access door because Paddock had screwed it shut with a metal
bracket. Entering through another door, Campos went to the door of the
room where Paddock was waiting with his arsenal of fourteen AR-15s
equipped with bump stocks that enabled him to fire them like automatic
weapons, along with eight AR-10s, a revolver, and multiple one hundred–
round magazines loaded with ammunition. When Campos knocked,
Paddock opened fire through the door.4
One of the rounds caught Campos in the thigh, and he took refuge in an
alcove. Inside, Paddock took a hammer and bashed out the windows of both
suites he had rented. A Mandalay maintenance man named Steve Schuck
approached his door about that time and barely evaded another round of
gunfire. Campos, from his alcove, warned him to take cover, which he did.
Then Schuck got on his radio and warned the hotel’s security office about
the shooting on floor thirty-two.
Ranging from room to room with his weapons, Paddock had unleashed
a relentless fusillade of more than eleven hundred high-velocity rifle rounds
into the audience gathered below him. Then, just as suddenly, he had
stopped. When the tactical team came to his door about ten minutes after he
had first opened fire, the gunfire had ceased; when the team broke through
an hour later, he was already long dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.5
Fifty-eight people died at the Route 91 festival that day, thirty-six of
them women. Another 851 people were injured, about half of them with
gunshot and shrapnel wounds. Hundreds more were injured in the scramble
to escape—broken legs, torn ligaments, deep cuts.6
There were thousands of survivors that day. They all endured the same
trauma—and all of them are still in various stages of recovery. Many, like
Jenna, receive therapeutic treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Despite the shooter having been taken out, the chaos continued for
hours afterward as reports poured in of shooters at other hotels, including
the Hooters where Jenna and Sammi had taken refuge. Eventually, as the
morning light grew brighter outside and it became clear that things were
safe again, the two of them wandered back downstairs, out of the casino,
and onto the streets again. They navigated their way back to their hotel,
showered and changed, then caught the 11:00 a.m. flight home to SeaTac
airport just as they had planned all along.
Camden was waiting for Jenna. It was a heartfelt embrace, but it took
Jenna a while before she could hug her daughter for as long as she wanted.
In her mind, she had already died and left her little girl behind, and now it
felt like a betrayal for which she could not forgive herself.
That was just the beginning of her journey back. Three years later, she is
still traveling it.
“Now I live thinking it’s going to happen everywhere,” Jenna says. “I
don’t think I’m entirely wrong. I think that because of the way that things
have been going, people just shoot other people in Walmarts these days. So
I don’t go to Walmart. I do avoid Walmart.”
She says she still finds herself affected “in strange ways,” adding that
she keeps wondering if or when things will start getting better. “He didn’t
take away a day, he didn’t take away a week—he’s taken so much joy from
my life, and that’s the hardest part.
“I drive by the school where kids are playing and I can’t have a nice
thought like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to drive past this elementary and see Camden
playing out there.’ No. I have to think, ‘Oh, it would be so easy for
someone to hop the fence and just kill all those kids.’
“That’s what I’ve been robbed of. It’s hard—like just having nice
thoughts, it’s hard to have nice thoughts to think they get ruined by such a
horrible thing. I think that’s what is the hardest part.
“I can walk through what happened with anybody; it’s not traumatic to
go through that for me anymore. It’s what I’ve been left with that’s so
destructive.”
Even having the blessing of a happy-go-lucky toddler in her life
becomes a kind of curse: “I mean, I think it helps to have [Camden] in my
life, but I think that she is also a source of my worry. I think I’d have less
worry if it was, ‘Oh, if I get shot in this movie theater, my parents will be
sad, my brother will be sad, but no one needs me.’ So I think having
someone that needs you almost makes it worse because you’re thinking,
‘Someone needs me out there.’”
As is so often the case with trauma, it actually hits the hardest at quiet
moments when she’s not busy and it blindsides her. “I don’t look forward to
lying in bed at night,” Jenna says. “After this, I would never want to go to
bed and not go to sleep for an hour because I don’t want that time alone
with myself to think about things because I know where I’m going to go. So
I’ll either read or watch TV to the point where I can barely keep my eyes
open. So then I don’t even have the ability to sit there and have some sort of
deep thought.
“Because if I start thinking—why do these things happen in the world?
It’s just too much. Because there’s no answer.”

________

In an ironic twist, the survivors of the Route 91 massacre, as well as the

families of the victims, soon found themselves victimized a second time by
the same universe of conspiracy theories that had fueled the mass death in
the first place.
Misinformation had been rampant throughout the night, and it continued
into the next day and then into the following week. A thread at the alt-right-
friendly 4chan /pol/ message board misidentified the shooter, describing
him as a registered Democrat;7 this misinformation quickly spread to other
right-wing sites, such as Gateway Pundit. A fake news site called Your
News Wire reported a second gunman firing from Mandalay’s fourth floor.8
A Russian news agency, Sputnik, falsely reported that the FBI had
identified the shooter as part of a terrorist group;9 still other false reports
indicated the shooter was a member of the antifascist movement.10
 But that was just the beginning.
The conspiracy theories about what happened in Vegas that night began
spreading widely through the usual rumor mills, particularly Infowars and
its dozens of YouTube imitators whose ability to attract audiences usually
depends on their ability to be outrageous. Soon, the narrative in conspiracy
land was set: this was a false flag operation by government agencies
designed to provide the government an excuse to take away their weapons.
They couldn’t have known that this was precisely the same narrative
that Stephen Paddock believed—namely, that his attack would inspire an
extreme government crackdown that would reveal its tyranny.
The day after the massacre, Alex Jones speculated that it had been
perpetrated by his usual menu of favorite villains: Islamic State,
antifascists, leftists, Communists, and globalists. On his Infowars show,
Jones went even further, warning his audience that liberals were going to be
killing them.11

The enemy’s engaging us. Everybody needs to be packing,

like I told you on Friday and on Sunday. Get ready—
Democrats are going to be killing people, a lot of folks. And
obviously, just like you don’t see conservatives going out
and doing mass shootings, they don’t want to blame the
Second Amendment, they don’t want to go out and kill
people.
It’s almost always drug-head Democrats, devil
worshippers, you name it. That’s their M.O. The Democrats
know when they mass kill now, they know to not say they’re
Democrat operatives. They just want to use that to get the
Second Amendment and get a civil war going.

According to Jones, the whole event was part of a scheme to cow the
American public into accepting sweeping gun controls: “With this event
and this attack, the leftists, the globalists, the social engineers are going to
use those dear lives of those poor people who were snuffed out to try to
wound what’s left of our republic and complete our journey into
disarmament,” he warned, claiming that comments after the shootings by
Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton were proof that they intended to start a
“race war in America.”
Although Jones had promoted the idea of a looming civil war for
decades, his projection-fueled rhetoric reached stochastic terror levels as the
broadcast continued:

This is a leftist Democratic Party operation, with mainstream

media, corporate media hyping the climate of “kill the
Republicans, kill the white people.”
They’ve gotten so radicalized with their own propaganda
that they’re believing all this stuff. And then when their folks
go out and kill, they cover it up, and they blame it on the
victims.
. . . They’re getting ready for war! And in full spectrum
dominance, they’re going to carry out the attacks, and then
they’re going to turn around and blame us and say our rights
and our freedoms are to blame! Get it? That’s twenty-first-
century warfare. You carry out the attack, and then you
blame your enemy, who you just killed.

Near the end, he concluded with a red-faced rant warning his audience
that their “globalist” enemies intended to round them up in concentration
camps and murder them en masse, with a flourish worthy of Slim Pickens:

You think you’re hunting us? We’re going to destroy you

politically. And we’re going to hold our fire. But you watch,
they’re going to false flag even bigger now. They’re going
for total broke to break your will. And if they do that, then
they’re gonna put fifty million people in forced-labor camps.
That’s mainstream news. And they can’t wait to give every
one of these little Communists time with your wife and kids
in some dungeon. ’Cause that’s what they want.
I’m not kiddin’. They’re comin’. You wanted to see the
fight for America, you’re living it, 2017, baby! This is it!
Toe-to-toe combat with the globalists, politically.12
 The conspiracy theorists immediately began claiming that the victims
weren’t really victims but instead paid “crisis actors” working on behalf of
a “globalist” conspiracy. That’s when the death threats started.
Braden Matejka, a thirty-year-old from British Columbia, caught a
bullet in the back of his head that night when he and his girlfriend, Amanda
Homulos, turned to run away. However, he was lucky: the shot only grazed
his skull and knocked him down. He found himself in a hospital room
recovering the next week, and TV crews visited. Both he and Homulos gave
interviews describing how happy they were to be alive and how fortunate
they felt.13
Soon there were supportive posts on Facebook, but then everything took
a turn to the dark side. Strangers began showing up in the comments
making threats and accusing the couple and their family of being liars.
“Obviously a TERRIBLE CRISIS ACTOR,” wrote one named
Samantha. “HE’S SCAMMING THE PUBLIC. . . . This was a government
set up.”
“YOUR A LIAR AND THEFT PIECE OF CRAP,” wrote another
named Karen.
“You’ll pay on the other side,” said a user named Mach. Others called
Braden a “LYING BASTARD,” “scumbag govt actor,” and “fuckin
FRAUD,” while one user named Josh wrote: “I hope someone comes after
you and literally beats the living fuck outa you.”
“You are a lying piece of shit and I hope someone truly shoots you in
the head,” a commenter wrote to Matejka on Facebook. “Your soul is
disgusting and dark! You will pay for the consequences!” said another.
“There are all these families dealing with likely the most horrific thing
they’ll ever experience, and they are also met with hate and anger and are
being attacked online about being a part of some conspiracy,” Taylor
Matejka, Braden’s brother, told the Guardian. “It’s madness. I can’t imagine
the thought process of these people. Do they know that we are actual
people?”
“It makes you angry,” said Rob McIntosh, fifty-two, who suffered chest
and arm wounds at the massacre yet was subsequently accused of faking his
injuries. “You’ve already been through something that’s traumatic and
terrible, and you have someone who is attacking your honesty. You don’t
even have the opportunity to respond.”14
 Taylor Matejka said nothing seemed to work when he tried responding
to the conspiracy theorists in person: “I’d be happy to talk to these people,
but it seems there’s no reasoning. A really sad part of this is that a lot of
these people think they’re fighting the good fight and exposing truth.”
Jenna encountered similar people in her mother’s social circle on
Facebook. “It wasn’t like a conspiracy group, but they were just saying like,
‘what’s the funniest conspiracy that you believe in?’ And . . . some of them
were funny. Like—oh—‘I believe reptiles run the government’ and it’s like
. . . ‘the Titanic was switched.’ It’s . . . kind of fun. And then it started to get
into 9/11, and Sandy Hook, or Vegas, or Holocaust deniers.
“And I got so heated—like to the point where I was shaking and crying
—because it was these whackadoodles who believe the craziest things.
They don’t believe Sandy Hook happened and basically were saying the
same thing—that everyone there was paid actors. And I lost it.
“So someone said, ‘Oh, the Las Vegas shooting didn’t happen the way
they said. No one was up in the hotel. The shooter was down below.’ And
that it was all government driven—that there were multiple shooters, there’s
proof.
“I understand where people get worked into these beliefs, but this
person insisted that the victims were paid actors. And I said, ‘Okay, well, I
can tell you that it wasn’t. I definitely was not paid anything. So I’m still
waiting on that check.’” The woman remained insistent, though, eventually
concluding that “we’ll just never know what really happened.
“It was just so frustrating. You can’t even reason with someone like
that. And when they get enough people to believe it, then they just feed off
each other, it seems like.”
Jenna used to dabble in conspiracy theories a little herself, just for fun.
Now she runs away from them, because she knows firsthand that they arise
in a vacuum of ignorance. “These people who believe like Sandy Hook or
Vegas didn’t happen—I doubt any of them have spoken to anyone that was
there. So they can say whatever they want: ‘Oh, well, it’s because
everyone’s a paid actor.’ And I’m, ‘Talk to me, I’m right here.’
“I just don’t think they want to know the truth—or it’s not that they
don’t want to know the truth, I think it’s that they think they know the truth,
and it would be hard to be faced with something else that then they would
be able to reconcile with the story that they’ve created.”
 The official investigation took ten months, but in the end, it provided no
resolution for the victims, the survivors, or their families. Las Vegas
Metro’s official report in August 2018, despite the abundance of evidence
of Stephen Paddock’s conspiracism, was unable to determine any kind of
motivation. It pointed to his lack of organizational affiliations, the absence
of any kind of manifesto, and no evidence of a conspiracy before
concluding: “What we have been able to answer are the questions of who,
what, when, where and how . . . what we have not been able to definitively
answer is why Stephen Paddock committed this act.” The FBI’s report five
months later likewise concluded that “there was no single or clear
motivating factor.”15
That meant that the deadliest mass shooting by an individual in
American history was committed for reasons that law enforcement officials
couldn’t explain—to the victims, their families, the survivors, or to the
public. The conspiracy theories that Paddock believed in, in this calculus,
could not count as a motive. And so his victims just became the inert things
Paddock himself conceived them as.
“Sacrifices.”

________

The six hundred or so teenagers who had gathered in late July 2011 for
summer camp on Utoya Island—an idyllic twenty-six-acre getaway on
Lake Tyri, about twenty-four miles northwest of Oslo, where the Norwegian
Labour Party’s youth wing, the AUF, had for years held its annual summer
training sessions for up-and-coming young political leaders—were in the
kind of place where violence, especially hate-filled, relentless lethal
violence, did not seem even remotely possible. It was so peaceful. So
beautiful. The atmosphere at the camp, as always, was convivial and
uplifting.16
All of which is a large part of why Anders Breivik chose Utoya Island
as his target. It seemed so inconceivable. Certainly, what happened was.
The kids at Utoya were the nation’s future political elite, and that too is
why Breivik targeted them. A number of prime ministers had attended the
camp, crediting the camp with shaping their careers, and were known for
returning and giving speeches. That morning of July 22, former prime
minister Gro Harlem Brundtland addressed the kids. Breivik originally
wanted to target the camp while she was there—his plan was to behead her
on video then post it on the Internet—but encountered a hitch in his plan
when his departure from downtown Oslo was delayed.17
Then again, when he departed Oslo that morning, the city was in utter
chaos because he had set off the truck bomb he had created in the
Volkswagen Crafter van at his farm in the center of the government office
district, near prime minister Jens Stoltenberg’s offices. It was a McVeigh-
size blast that killed eight people.18
Most of them were government workers, including Anne Lise Holter, a
fifty-one-year-old senior consultant to Stoltenberg. There was Hanna
Endresen, sixty-one, a receptionist in the security department; Jon Vegard
Lervag, thirty-two, a lawyer in the justice department; Ida Marie Hill,
thirty-four, an adviser to the ministry of justice; Hanne Ekroll Loevlie, a
thirty-year-old senior government worker originally from rural Tyristrand;
twenty-six-year-old Kjersti Berg Sand, who worked on international issues
in justice. A couple of random passersby—Tove Ashill Knutsen, fifty-six,
who was on her way to a subway station, and Kai Hauge, thirty-two, who
owned a nearby bar and restaurant—also were killed. Another 209 people
were injured, twelve of them severely. However, none of the government
main ministers was among the injured, including Stoltenberg.19
Many of the teens on Utoya that day had parents who worked in Oslo’s
government district, so when word of the bombing reached the island, the
camp suspended activities so attendees could contact their parents. In the
meantime, they were told that a police officer from the mainland was on his
way over on the small ferry that serviced the camp.
That officer was actually Breivik, dressed in a police uniform with
tactical armor and carrying high-powered rifles in cases.20 He had driven to
Utoya in his mother’s vehicle and arrived at the ferry dock, requesting it be
summoned to fetch him, telling them his name was “Martin Nilsen.” But
camp director Monica Bøsei became suspicious on the ferry ride back and
summoned security director Trond Berntsen when they reached shore.
When Berntsen asked to see some ID, Breivik pulled out his pistol and
dispatched both Berntsen and Bøsei on the spot.21
It was done out of view of the teenagers, however, so when Breivik
walked up to the open field where they were assembled, he asked them to
gather around him so he could debrief them on the bombing in Oslo. When
they had encircled him, he opened fire with one of the high-powered rifles.
The kids screamed and scattered, and when the open space had cleared a
minute or so later, there were only tents and fallen teenagers who had been
shot as they fled.22
Breivik then walked into the camp’s café/canteen, where thirteen teens
had taken refuge. He burst in the doors and announced: “You will die today!
Marxists, liberals, members of the elite!” Then he began shooting all of
them, first with a pistol, then finishing them each with a shotgun blast to the
head. Afterward, he went outside and finished off the teens who had fallen
in the open field outside in identical fashion.23
For the next hour or so, Breivik conducted a systematic search for camp
attendees around the rest of the island. He tried getting into the schoolhouse
building and found it was locked; after firing a couple of rounds through the
lock without it budging, he moved on to the kids hiding in the woods. His
rifle was loaded with special hollow-point bullets designed to cause the
most damage to his victims’ internal organs and body tissue.24
As he walked along, he shouted: “You’re going to die today, Marxists!”
And when he found them—often clustered together in protective huddles—
he cold-bloodedly opened fire. As he reached the island’s edge, he found
more of them similarly clustered beneath rock outcroppings, at which point
he simply mowed them down.25
Many of the teens decided to try swimming for it. Breivik began firing
at them from shore, shouting as he did so. Others swam back to shore when
they realized they couldn’t make it, only to encounter Breivik walking up to
them there and firing off more rounds from his rifle.
Police had been desperately trying to reach the island, but a variety of
bureaucratic snafus prevented them from reaching Utoya until ninety
minutes or so after Breivik’s arrival. When they got there, Breivik freely
surrendered, smirking and telling them that all would become clear soon.26
They also found seventy-seven dead teenagers. Another 110 were
injured, 55 of them with serious wounds and lifelong consequences.
“Sacrifices.”

________

Dylann Roof very nearly didn’t go through with it after meeting and
spending an hour or so in Bible study with the people he had targeted for
death. They were “so nice,” he later told investigators that he almost
changed his mind and called off what he called his “mission.”27
His primary target was the senior pastor of the church—Emanuel
Baptist AME in Charleston, South Carolina—whose Bible study sessions
he had joined the evening of June 17, 2015. The pastor’s name was
Reverend Clementa Pinckney,28 a man who had gained renown as national
civil rights leader and had recently been in the news advocating for the use
of body cameras by police officers in the wake of a highly publicized
shooting of a black man in Charleston.29 Roof told investigators later that he
picked Emanuel because of its long significance in the history of civil
rights.
Roof entered the church around eight in the evening, dressed in a long-
sleeve gray shirt and jeans with a fanny pack rotated in front, as the
gathered congregants broke into groups for Bible studies. He asked for
Reverend Pinckney by name and then sat next to him. For the next hour or
so, a pleasant conversation about scripture commenced, and Roof appeared
to be enjoying himself. But at some point around 9:00 p.m., his
countenance changed, survivors said, and he suddenly pulled a pistol out of
the fanny pack and shot Reverend Pinckney point-blank in the head, killing
him instantly.30
Then he aimed at the eighty-seven-year-old woman across the table
from him, Susie Jackson. Her nephew, twenty-six-year-old Tywanza
Sanders, was seated next to her and began speaking in a calm voice to Roof,
telling him he didn’t need to do this.31
“Yes I do. I have to do it,” Roof replied. “You rape our women and
you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Sanders dove across
the chair to protect his aunt, and Roof shot him next, then Susie Jackson.
Then he systematically went around the room, shooting everyone in it,
shouting: “Y’all want something to pray about? I’ll give you something to
pray about.” Two survived by pretending to be dead. Roof left one person
alive to act as a witness to the carnage then tried to shoot himself, but, after
reloading five times, he had run out of ammunition. So he walked out of the
church and into the night. He was arrested the next day in North Carolina.32
“Sacrifices.”

________
The first victims of Elliot Rodger’s rampage were two roommates with
whom he shared an apartment in Isla Vista and one of their friends. It’s not
clear what set the final spark, but that day—May 23, 2014—Rodger lay in
wait at the apartment as each of them returned home, where he ambushed
them with a large knife. He left the bodies of the roommates—Weihann
“David” Wang, twenty, and Cheng Yuan “James” Hong, twenty—in their
bedrooms and the corpse of their nineteen-year-old friend, George Chen, in
the bathroom.33
Rodger appears to have waited several more hours in the apartment
before setting out in his black BMW with his Sig Sauer P26 pistols on what
appears to have been a meticulously planned mass killing. Except, of
course, that it went awry almost immediately.34
The initial plan, after all, called for him to “enter the hottest sorority
house of UCSB” and then to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck up,
blonde slut I see inside there.” That was what he said, anyway, in the
“Retribution” video he uploaded to YouTube as he drank his vanilla latte at
Starbucks that evening.
That didn’t work out. He did indeed walk up to the front door of the
Alpha Phi sorority house near the UCSB campus and knock on it at about
9:30 p.m. No one answered. It was getting dark.35
However, there were random people nearby on the lawns of neighboring
sororities, so he began shooting at them instead—wounding three women
from the Delta Delta Delta sorority, two of them fatally—before getting
back in his car and peeling away.
The short remainder of Rodger’s life consisted of a mobile gun rampage
from inside his car through Isla Vista. He shot and killed a man standing in
front of a nearby market and then continued shooting: a man and woman
standing outside a residence a short distance away, a woman waiting at a
crosswalk, another woman walking along a sidewalk. He also used his car
to intentionally strike several pedestrians, as well as a man riding a bicycle,
all of whom were injured but survived.36
When sheriff’s deputies cornered him at an intersection, they exchanged
gunfire, and Rodger suffered a wound to the hip. Still careering madly
through the streets, he whipped around and took out one last bicyclist
before shooting himself in the head—at which point his car veered off to
the side and crashed to a halt.
 All told, in addition to Elliot Rodger, there were six people killed in Isla
Vista that day, and fourteen more injured, several severely.
“Sacrifices.”

________

Yonge Street is the main artery in downtown Toronto, and it’s usually
packed with traffic, especially in the tony North York City Centre, where
Alek Minassian drove his van and parked long enough to post his Facebook
message praising the incels.
For Minassian, however, traffic was no object. Starting up the big van,
he hopped the curb at Yonge and Finch Avenue and began driving at a high
rate of speed down the sidewalk, mowing down every pedestrian he
encountered.37 He remained on the sidewalk for several more blocks, a trail
of bodies in his wake. He seemed to be aiming especially for women. One
witness said that Minassian appeared to be like someone playing a video
game, trying to kill as many pedestrians as possible.38
At one point the sidewalk became too narrow and he was forced back
onto Yonge Street, where he remained for a couple of blocks, still careering
along at high speed but without hitting anyone, until he reached Park Home
Avenue. Veering back onto the sidewalk, he again began mowing people
down as he encountered them.39
Minassian’s van had struck so many people that its front end was badly
damaged, and it finally lurched to a stop just as he turned a corner onto the
sidewalk on Poyntz Avenue. He sat inside until a police officer reached the
van. When he got outside, he had something in his hand, which he pointed
at the officer, screaming: “Shoot me in the head!” The officer, gun in hand,
instead patiently talked him down and arrested him. Minassian still awaits
trial, scheduled for November 2020.
The scene behind him: bodies strewn along the avenue, shrieking sirens,
and aid workers trying to rescue the victims. There were shoes randomly
tossed in the street and torn pieces of clothing and briefcases.40
The final toll: ten people killed and fifteen injured, many critically.
Eight of the ten dead were women, as were twelve of the injured.
“Sacrifices.”

________
When Destinee Magnum and her Muslim friend boarded the Green Line
MAX train in downtown Portland on May 26, 2017, it was just an ordinary
early rush-hour ride at around 4:00 p.m. The two teenage girls, one black
and outgoing and the other shy and wearing a hijab, managed to find seats
out of Union Station and were quietly chatting with each other when they
pulled into the station at the Lloyd Center.41
That was where Jeremy Christian got on board.
Unlike the night before, when he had harassed Demetria Hester, this
train was full of people. But that didn’t stop Christian. No sooner had he
boarded than he spotted Destinee and her friend, immediately standing in
front of them and shouting at them about how they didn’t belong in
Portland. That Muslims should die, because they had been killing Christians
for hundreds of years. That the girl in the hijab should go back to Saudi
Arabia.
The girls got up and fled to the back of the train, seeking another seat.
Christian followed them, still shouting.42
Three men, regular commuters who had been watching the scene
unfold, stepped between Christian and the two women. One of them—Rick
Best, fifty-three, a Portland city employee—stood closest to Christian and
tried using reason: “I know you are taxpayer, but this is not OK. You’re
scaring people.” Christian kept shouting that it was about his free speech.
As they neared the next stop, Taliesen Myrddin Namkai-Meche, twenty-
three, pleaded with Christian: “Please get off this train.”
Another of the trio, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, twenty-one, recognized
Christian from the alt-right march the month before, when he had marched
with the counterprotesters and Christian had made a scene. He tried pushing
himself between Christian and the women.
“You fucking touch me again and I’ll kill you,” Christian snarled at him.
At that moment he lost his balance and fell back; when he came back up, he
had a knife in his hand, and he plunged it into Rick Best’s neck, then turned
to Namkai-Meche and Fletcher and did the same to each of them. Then he
ran from the train and away from the Hollywood station. The two dark-
skinned girls fled the train, too, leaving their belongings behind.43
Rick Best bled out before help could arrive and was declared dead at the
scene. Namkai-Meche, who told everyone who stopped to help that he
loved them, died in the intensive-care ward at the nearby hospital. Only
Fletcher, who remained in the hospital for a month recovering from his
wound, survived the attack.
At his arraignment on murder and attempted murder charges—but,
mysteriously, no hate-crime charges—two days later, Christian ranted
behind the glass for the benefit of the press.44
“Free speech or die, Portland!” he shouted. “You got no safe place. This
is America! Get out if you don’t like free speech!”
After hearing the official charges being read, he shouted again: “Death
to the enemies of America! Leave this country if you hate our freedom.
Death to antifa!
“You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism!”
“Sacrifices.”

________

Buckey Wolfe had made himself a kind of crude sword that he kept in the
mother-in-law apartment at the back of his parents’ home in Seattle, where
he lived. It was a two-edged piece of steel about four feet long, which had
been sharpened at the tang end to a fine point with razor edges.45
The evening of January 6, 2019, his brother James paid a visit. They
chatted for a while, and their dad handed them some food before they
retreated to Buckey’s mother-in-law’s apartment.
At 6:40 p.m., Buckey called 911 and told the dispatcher that he had
killed his brother by ramming the crude sword into his head.46
“Kill me, kill me, I can’t live in this reality,” he said and rambled on:
“God told me he was a lizard,” he added.
When police arrived, they found James Wolfe dead inside the
apartment, fatally wounded by the sword. Buckey was gone, but police
found him shortly afterward, walking through the neighborhood about a
mile away.
When detectives interviewed him at police headquarters, he told them
“that their eyes and mouths were changing and asked if they could see
lizards in the room,” according to court records.47
The Proud Boys shortly afterward issued a lengthy statement claiming
that Buckey Wolfe had never been a member of their organization, claiming
he had “never made it past our strict vetting protocols.”48 But in fact, nearly
a year before, Wolfe had posted the certificate on his Facebook page that
verified his “first degree” membership, along with multiple group shots
with other Proud Boys out on the streets.49
The judge ordered Wolfe detained without bail, agreeing with
prosecutors that he posed an extreme danger to the community. He awaits
trial in Seattle, having been found mentally competent by the court in July
2019.
“Sacrifices.”

________

Brenton Tarrant had the ultimate alt-right massacre in mind: livestreamed,

like a first-person shooter video game.50
After sending his manifesto out into the world from the car parked
outside the Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch, he got out of the car and
began livestreaming from the GoPro strapped to his chest. He told viewers:
“Subscribe to PewDiePie!” Everything that happened during the next
seventeen minutes was broadcast live on Facebook.51
And it was a horror show. Tarrant walked up to the door of the mosque
and was greeted there by a worshipper who smiled and said, “Hello,
brother.” He was the first to die.52
Tarrant then could be seen systematically walking through the mosque
and gunning down dozens of worshippers there for Friday prayer. Viewers
could see him aiming his weapon—an apparently modified semiautomatic
high-powered rifle, though at other times he could be seen using both a
pistol and a shotgun. All of them were being fired at people who then fell
over and died.53
Most disturbingly, the videos engendered by this livestream—which
were then shared globally over the Internet and became a kind of forbidden
fruit after being outlawed in a number of countries, including New Zealand
—were almost live-action re-creations of first-person shooter games, which
often present the world to video-game players (as Tarrant himself was) from
precisely this perspective.54 Tarrant clearly set up the camera perspective
with the chest-level GoPro with exactly this in mind.55
When he was done at Al-Noor, Tarrant jumped in his car and headed out
in a necessarily roundabout route to the city’s other mosque, with police
cars screaming toward the Al-Noor mosque passing him along the way.
When he finally reached the Linwood Islamic Centre, five kilometers away,
about eight minutes had passed.
However, he apparently had done a poor job of scouting this location
and approached it from a back door, where he was unable to gain entry. So
he began firing at people through the window there, striking a number of
worshippers inside.
Tarrant ran out of ammo, though, and returned to his car to fetch another
weapon. When he did so, one of the Islamic Centre congregants—a forty-
eight-year-old father of four named Abdul Aziz Wahabzada—whose four
children were inside the mosque—ran out of the mosque with an electronic
card reader the size of a small adding machine and threatened to bash
Tarrant with it.56 Startled, Tarrant pulled out a gun and fired at Aziz, who
ducked between cars to avoid the string of gunshots. Eventually Aziz was
able to retrieve a gun that Tar-rant had abandoned when his second gun ran
out of ammo. Gun in hand, Aziz chased Tarrant to his car and threw the gun
through one of the car’s windows. Tarrant hit the ignition and the gas and
drove away. Police arrested him a few blocks away; they believe he was on
his way to a third target.57
Tarrant killed fifty-one people that day: forty-two at Al-Noor and
another seven at Linwood; two of the Al-Noor wounded later died at the
hospital. The slain ranged in age from three to seventy-seven. Another
thirty-six were treated for gunshot wounds, a number of them life-
threatening, though most survived. Fourteen others suffered shrapnel
injuries.58
“Sacrifices.”
Chapter 4

TANGLED TALES

It was clear that, even though the army colonel was trained in public
relations and handling a crowd, he was up against something completely
different.
“When we have a federal government that cannot tell the truth, how do
we know that what you’re saying is true?” asked one of the commission
judges, reading from an audience questions card. The overflow audience of
about five hundred people packed into the Bastrop County Commission
chambers in Texas cheered loudly.1
The officer, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Lastoria of U.S. Army Special
Operations Command, was there to try to explain to his rural audience how
and why the largest training exercise in the army’s history, code-named Jade
Helm 15, was scheduled to take place over the course of two months in a
broad swath of the nation’s countryside, mainly in seven states in the
Southwest and interior West, that summer of 2015.
“We’re truly invested in everybody’s personal rights and their privacy,”
Lastoria told the audience. “That’s what we live for, to support the
Constitution of the United States and that’s what everybody wants to
protect. . . . We’re not going to be interfering with people’s livelihoods, or
negatively impact their farms. Some of these counties that we’re going to be
in, they’re very concerned that we’re going to disrupt recreational activity.
It’s not going to happen.”
The first questioner came to the microphone, introduced himself, then
asked: “In spite of people’s overwhelming opposition to this program,
would the commission consider rescinding their invitation to these guys?
And would the court be offended if I told the colonel that I didn’t believe a
single word that he just said?”
There was more raucous applause.
Someone then told Lastoria that Jade Helm appeared to be nothing more
than “a preparation for martial law.”
“It is not a preparation for martial law,” the colonel answered.
“That’s what you say,” his interlocutor replied. Again, the crowd
cheered.
“It has nothing to do with martial law, period. We are Title 10 forces,
not Title 32, nothing like that. No martial law in any way, shape, or form.
We basically simply want to train United States Special Operations forces
for future operations overseas. That’s it,” Lastoria explained.
No one in the audience seemed convinced. Notably, there were large
numbers of Infowars T-shirts among the people voicing the most
skepticism, and indeed the questions reflected claims that Alex Jones had
been making on his nationally broadcast conspiracy theory program.2
According to Jones, Jade Helm was tantamount to martial law. He told
his listeners that because the special operations forces from four branches of
the U.S. military would be blending in with local populations, they were in
fact secretly training for an eventual battle to disarm Americans.
“Jade Helm 15 is more than just a military exercise, it’s also an exercise
of the new field in geospatial intelligence using human domain analytics to
map the politics and thoughts of any nation, state, city, right down to the
individual,” he told his audience.
Jones had been circulating similar theories for a while. The previous
year he had claimed that a much smaller army training exercise involving a
mockup of an urban invasion zone actually was intended to prepare armed
forces for an attack on American citizens, labeling it part of “a giant
buildup for war with the American people.”
All along, army officials dismissed these claims, particularly as Jade
Helm came under attack. The exercise, they asserted, was nothing more
than “routine training to maintain a high level of readiness for [special
forces] since they must be ready to support potential missions anywhere in
the world at a moment’s notice.” Lastoria told reporters that “the concerns
expressed center around misinterpretations.
“Unofficial sources providing inaccurate information on Jade Helm
want people to believe that it’s something other than a training exercise,”
Lastoria said.
The theories even spread to Fox News, where Megyn Kelly described
the conspiracy theorists merely as “critics”: “Well, conspiracy theories are
running wild tonight about the army’s plan for a multistate training exercise
this summer called ‘Jade Helm 15,’” she told her audience. “While the
military says they’re just training soldiers for the realities of war, critics say
the army is preparing for modern-day martial law.”3
What apparently drove the theorists to leap to the conclusion that the
exercise was nefarious in intent was a map that had been leaked in
connection with the army’s mock strategy for the exercise showing that
Texas and Utah, as well as parts of California, had been designated “hostile
territory.” Jones and others immediately claimed this reflected the Obama
administration’s view of those states and suggested that this was more
preparation for martial law.
“Training with the police, training with locals in plainclothes, quote,
doing suspicious activities, is to train the police to work with the military in
covert operations, and to condition the military to accept it, and to condition
the public to accept it, and then when we cover it and talk about it, they
practice a psyop in real time, putting out this information,” Jones claimed.4
Infowars was hardly alone. Some right-wing radio talkers from Texas
began making similar claims. Next News Network, a right-wing website
with a history of regurgitating propaganda from Russian websites, also
chimed in with a series of reports on Jade Helm. In one video, an announcer
intoned: “This is without doubt the largest public-conditioning exercise in
American history. This, as the public watches Cheyenne Mountain
reopening in anticipation of an EMP attack, and key operations of the New
York Federal Reserve moving to Chicago in the event of a natural disaster.
Now the event that is truly on the horizon is anyone’s guess, however, one
thing is for sure: troops will be ready and trained to take over your town
when it happens.”5
One of the men who questioned Lastoria in Bastrop was particularly
keen to know if a memorandum created by the Department of Homeland
Security in 2009 describing how right-wing extremists might target military
veterans for recruitment—and citing certain conservative causes, including
gun rights and abortion, as among the issues around which radical terrorists
might act—had any role in the army’s designations of the area as “hostile.”
Infowars interviewed him afterward. “I think what concerns me the
most is, I am a student of history, and I know that governments go
tyrannical,” the man said. “And I know that our government, through
Homeland Security, has labeled people like the kind of people that live in
Bastrop that are conservative gun owners, libertarians, veterans, the
government’s labeled those people as potential terrorists. And so I do see an
odd correlation between a huge military buildup and a hostile designation
for the state of Texas in this area.”6
Conservative Texas politicians echoed this paranoia. Representative
Louie Gohmert of Texas released a statement on Jade Helm, noting, “When
leaders within the current administration believe that major threats to the
country include those who support the Constitution, are military veterans,
or even ‘cling to guns or religion,’ patriotic Americans have reason to be
concerned.”7
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, who was gearing up for a run as a presidential
candidate that year, blamed it on President Obama: “When the federal
government has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy in this
administration, the natural consequence is that many citizens don’t trust
what it is saying.”8
Shortly after the Bastrop gathering, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, sent
a letter to the commander of the Texas State Guard ordering his men to
monitor the Jade Helm operations. “During the training operation, it is
important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private
property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed,” he wrote. (It later
emerged that much of the hysteria regarding Jade Helm was in fact the
product of a Russian disinformation campaign intended to sow chaos
among American voters and disrupt an American military exercise.)9
That afternoon before the Bastrop commission, Lastoria tried to
reassure the crowd by appealing to their patriotism. “I’d like everyone to
not confuse apples and pumpkins, OK?” he told the audience and pointed to
his army patches. “This institution has been around for 240 years. You may
have issues with the administration, OK? So be it. But this institution has
been with you for 240 years. Period.”
 However, what soon became clear was that his very presence there was
interpreted by the conspiracists who packed the room as powerful evidence
of a psychological operation, or “psyops,” as it’s known in the conspiracy
world, by the army.
“It appears that the psyops are taking place right now,” one questioner
insisted. “And psychological operations, meaning psychological warfare,
that would be a weapon being used against citizens if you’re talking about
blaming it, obtaining information, all that sort of stuff.”
Lastoria, of course, patiently denied this: “One, there’s not a psyop
campaign going on associated with that. This is an information brief, and it
has nothing to do with private citizens. . . . That’s not normally part of a
training exercise.”
Another asked if, by blending in, the soldiers participating would be
gathering information on people in the community “that they’ll come in
later and pick everybody up.”
Lastoria repeated: “Everybody truly wants this to be something that it is
not. All we want to do is make sure that our guys are trained for combat
overseas. That’s it.”
The more he sounded persuasive and reasonable, the worse things got.
“My question is, why is it not reasonable for me as a private citizen who
just questions things—maybe some conspiracy theories, but some of us just
have questions,” one man asked. “Why is it not reasonable for me to see
this as absolute training for a domestic rendition program where eventually,
worst-case scenario, in a potential battle, good folks like yourselves who
swore an oath would go after Alex Jones, Joe Biggs, Jakari Jackson—why
is it not reasonable, sir, for me to be scared of that?”
“There’s a reason that people have problems with this,” an elderly
woman interviewed by Infowars said afterward. “It’s not irrational fears.
It’s well-founded fears.”
Later that summer, as the exercise actually got under way and every
locale in which it was supposed to occur came to realize that the whole
operation was very low-key and designed not to create problems, much of
the paranoia simmered down. However, in the mind of conspiracy theorists,
the very lack of such evidence is actually proof that something nefarious is
occurring, and so a number of the dedicated “Patriots” worked into a lather
by Infowars began taking matters into their own hands.
 In August, gunshots were fired for two consecutive days near the Camp
Shelby Joint Forces Training Center in Mississippi’s Perry County, where
4,600 National Guard and Army Reserve troops were participating in the
exercise. No one was arrested, but Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant
ordered some of the military personnel to be armed as a precaution.
A few days later in North Carolina, federal agents assigned to the Joint
Terrorism Task Force in Charlotte arrested three men, including a
previously convicted felon, on a variety of conspiracy and firearms
violations. The trio had purchased assorted high-quality military gear and
ammunition and were making homemade explosives in anticipation of
interacting with Jade Helm troops, charging documents claimed.10
Walter Eugene Litteral, fifty, Christopher James Baker, forty-two, and
Christopher Todd Campbell, thirty, expressed “their disapproval of the Jade
Helm military exercises” to an FBI informant, their federal criminal
complaint said.
At trial, it emerged that Litteral had been building an arsenal of
explosive devices, including tennis-ball bombs and a variety of pipe bombs,
as well as simple bombs using coffee cans, gunpowder, and ball bearings.
He even had figured out how to make a dummy grenade into a live one.
Litteral, prosecutors said, “believed that the United States government
intended to use the armed forces to impose martial law, which the
conspirators planned to resist with violent force.”
The suspects also discussed a ninety-nine-acre “base camp” near
Clover, South Carolina, where they intended to plant booby traps and lure
government forces in and “kill them.”
All three men pleaded guilty. Litteral was sentenced to twenty-two
months in prison, while Baker and Campbell each received twenty months.
When Jade Helm wrapped up in September 2015, it was almost as if it
had never happened as far as the communities where it was held were
concerned.11 But following the uproar around it, the army has not attempted
a similar exercise of that scale again.

________

Conspiracy theories used to exist in a universe almost wholly separate from

the real world of policy and politics. That’s because, for most of their
history, conspiracies have been offered as counternarratives to the official
explanation for a range of historic real-life events—that is, they usually
have come after the fact, and they rarely if ever have changed anything. In
the new age of conspiracism, the theories have taken on a life of their own
that, as with Jade Helm, are fatally infecting real-world policy and even
military outcomes.
There is a long and colorful history of conspiracy theories infecting
popular culture and discourse—indeed, much of American history is
interwoven with them. For the most part, that effect has been diversionary
at worst, but there always has been a dark side to them, closely related to
their central function, which is to scapegoat.
One of the oldest conspiracy theories—perhaps the Ur-smear—is what
is commonly known as the “blood libel”: namely, the claim, originating in
the mists of antiquity, that Jews used the blood of Christian children,
obtained ritually from sacrificed abductees, to leaven their matzo dough.
Over the years, there have been about 150 recorded cases of Jews being
tortured and murdered by mobs because of this belief.12
Around the twelfth century, the legend became so widespread and
thoroughly believed in the English countryside that there were massacres of
Jews in London and York, and the Jewish delegation attending the
coronation of Richard the Lionhearted was attacked by the London crowd.13
A Benedictine monk penned an “investigation” of a boy’s murder in 1144
that claimed that a secret international council of Jews oversaw the annual
ritual killing of a Christian boy at Easter time and had selected England that
year.14 By 1255, when another boy named Hugh of Lincoln was found in a
well (the story is even recounted in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales),15 the
hysteria became so widespread and extreme that King Henry III—who also
stood to gain considerably financially by having his debtors executed—
intervened and ninety-one Jews were arrested and taken to the Tower of
London, eighteen of whom were put to death, and issued edicts banning
Jews from commerce with other Britons. His successor, Edward I, took the
final step and ordered the expulsion of all Jews from England in 1290. The
ban remained in place until 1655.16
Over the centuries, of course, a number of real-world plots and
conspiracies affected the course of European politics, and the reality of
these conspiracies led also to a number of theories about them that turned
out, in fact, to be completely bogus. As with the blood libel claims, these
theories not only were hyperventilating nonsense, they often created
scapegoats of an entire class of people. The most notorious of these was the
“Popish Plot” of seventeenth-century England, when a cleric named Titus
Oates composed a manuscript claiming that there was a massive conspiracy
by the Catholic Church to assassinate King Charles II. The ensuing three-
year panic after its 1678 publication led to the execution of twenty-two
men, most of them Jesuit priests. Five Catholic lords were imprisoned in the
tower, and the king ordered the expulsion of all Catholics from London.
Eventually, Oates was exposed as a fraud and convicted of perjury, for
which he spent three years in prison.17
Then there were the Bavarian Illuminati, whose legacy remains very
much with us. Between 1776 and 1785, this clandestine collection of highly
educated civic and intellectual leaders met in secret with the intent of
overpowering the prevailing monarchist rule in Europe and replacing it with
an Enlightenment-based society opposed to superstition and religious
influence over political life.18 Led by a Bavarian professor of philosophy
named Adam Weishaupt, they essentially plotted to take over the world
through secretive methods, because they had good reason to believe that
monarchists were too ruthless for them to attempt such a massive political
change in public view.19
The Illuminati started out small in number but gradually grew to
somewhere between 650 and 2,500 members, many of them elite politicians
and people in positions of authority and influence. Much of their
recruitment came from within the ranks of another secret society, the
Freemasons, who similarly shared Enlightenment ideals.20 Initially, it was
very popular within the more educated circles of aristocratic society, but
then it ran afoul of the ruling aristocracy, as well as the pro-monarchic sect
within the ranks of Freemasonry known as the Rosicrucians. In 1785,
Charles Theodore, the elector of Bavaria, banned all secret societies, with a
particular eye on the Illuminati. Weishaupt lost his teaching position and
was exiled to a remote Germanic duchy, where he lived out his years still
teaching philosophy.21
The lasting influence of the Illuminati, however, lies in the fear that they
created due to their secretive and subversive nature, and particularly in the
way they challenged the ruling monarchical order. Notably, a few years
after the group’s demise, a conspiracy-minded Jesuit priest with a fondness
for defending the authorities in power named Augustin Barruel published a
1793 text claiming that the excesses of the French Revolution’s Jacobins
were the fault of the Illuminati and its machinations. He also claimed that
the conspiracy’s design in fact was eventually to destroy Christianity and
the church.22
A Scottish professor named John Robison lustily joined in, publishing a
tract titled Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and
Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons,
Illuminati and Reading Societies. Robison’s claim was that the Illuminati
had first penetrated the Freemasons and then gone on to twist and pervert
the civic institutions the same men had led. He described Weishaupt as “a
human devil” and his mission as pure malevolent destruction.23 The tract
was widely read and influential; George Washington replied in
correspondence after reading the book that he doubted the Illuminati’s reach
had become deep into the United States but that it had been attempted, he
said, “is too evident to be questioned.”24
The anti-Catholicism of the old English Popish Plot hoax was revived in
the 1840s in the United States as an entrenched belief about Irish and Italian
immigrants—namely, that they were “papists” whose first loyalty was to the
Pope and the Vatican and Americans only secondarily.25 The most
prominent progenitor of this view—which came to call itself “nativism,”
referring to the descendants of the original thirteen colonies’ occupants—
was the inventor of the single-wire telegraph and its code system, Samuel F.
B. Morse. In the 1830s, Morse began railing against the “invasion” of the
country by rough-necked Irish Catholics.26
Morse published a text titled Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties
of the United States and Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the
United States through Foreign Immigration. He warned his readers that
America’s democratic institutions were viewed as a threat by European
despots, many of them allied with the Catholic Church, itself a type of
gigantic despotism in Morse’s view. They were sending their secret minions
to undermine and destroy those institutions, he claimed, in the person of
those immigrants.27
“You are marked for their prey,” he warned ominously, “not by foreign
bayonets, but by weapons surer of effecting the conquest of liberty than all
the munitions of physical combat in the military or naval storehouses of
Europe.” The only way to save America, Morse insisted, was to shut off all
immigration.
 Morse’s book helped spawn the nativist movement, and the results were
brutal: in New York, nativists battled Irish immigrants in violent riots in
which scores were killed.28 In 1844, a series of Philadelphia riots resulted in
churches being burned to the ground and dozens of homes destroyed, as
well as several dozen deaths and many more injuries. It also led to the
creation of a political party—the Know Nothing Party, which, after it won
seats in Congress in 1854, renamed itself the American Party—dedicated to
combating the “Romanist” plot to subvert American liberty, and
fundamentally anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and prone to
violence.29

________

The nativist movement and its anti-immigrant paranoia concocted another

conspiracy theory with lasting consequences: the “Yellow Peril.”30 This was
the racial animus that began rising against immigrant Chinese laborers in
the American West in the 1870s after the great intercontinental rail lines
were completed and the imported laborers suddenly were no longer
welcome. The white supremacists of the era began warning then that Asians
threatened to overwhelm Europeans and Americans with their sheer
numbers.31
During the successful drive to exclude them—culminating in the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—popular prejudices of the nativist variety
came into full play, such as a labor organizer’s screed warning of “China’s
Menace to the World”:

MEN FROM CHINA come here to do LAUNDRY WORK.

The Chinese Empire contains 600,000,000 (six hundred
millions) inhabitants.
The supply of these men is inexhaustible.
Every one doing this work takes BREAD from the
mouths of OUR WOMEN.
So many have come of late, that to keep at work, they are
obliged to cut prices.
And now, we appeal to the public, asking them will they
be partners to a deal which is only one of their many onward
marches in CRUSHING OUT THE INDUSTRIES OF OUR
 COUNTRY from our people by grasping them themselves.
Will you oblige the AMERICAN LAUNDRIES to CUT
THE WAGES OF THEIR PEOPLE by giving your
patronage to the CHINAMEN?32

It took on a special life, however, when Japanese began emigrating to the

United States in the mid-1890s, in many regards taking the place of Chinese
laborers on rail lines. Mostly this went unnoticed until Japan’s victory in the
Russo-Japanese War in 1905, an event that shocked the reigning white
supremacist worldview, since it marked the first time a nonwhite nation had
managed a military victory over a white European power. Suddenly
Japanese immigration was not just racially distasteful, but a perceived
threat.33
Japan’s victory and the Treaty of Portsmouth sparked imaginative fears
among white supremacists of a looming Asian world domination. California
newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst adopted the “Yellow Peril” as
a major storyline and began widely disseminating the theories around them
through the San Francisco Examiner, which in 1907 published a two-part
Sunday supplement titled “Japan May Seize the Pacific Coast,” which
reported that “the Yellow Peril is here.”34
Popular literature, too, contained similar motifs. Homer Lea’s bestseller
The Valor of Ignorance, published in 1909, prophesied a great war between
the United States and Japan, and even published maps showing the likely
routes of an invading imperial force on the western American coast.35
The theory underlying the Yellow Peril posited that the Japanese
emperor intended to invade the Pacific coast and that he was sending these
immigrants to American shores as shock troops to prepare the way for just
such a military action and to lay the groundwork for acts of sabotage and
espionage when the signal was given. As California politician James Phelan
put it in 1907, the Japanese immigrants represented an “enemy within our
gates.”36
Phelan—who served a single term in the U.S. Senate and was the mayor
of San Francisco—was probably the single most prominent figure in
California on the issue of Japanese immigration. In 1906, then-Mayor
Phelan denounced Japanese immigrants in a speech: “They now occupy
valleys in California by lease or purchase of land to the exclusion of not
only whites but Chinese, and if this silent invasion is permitted by the
federal government, they would at the rate at which they are coming, a
thousand a month, soon convert the fairest state in the union into a Japanese
colony. If they were naturalized they would outvote us.
“But California is white man’s country, and the two races cannot live
side by side in peace, and inasmuch as we discovered the country first and
occupied it, we propose to hold it against either a peaceful or a warlike
invasion.”37
Phelan was of course part of a much larger movement, embodied in
such groups as the Asiatic Exclusion League, which in its May 1905
newsletter pronounced the following:
“As long as California is white man’s country, it will remain one of the
grandest and best states in the union, but the moment the Golden State is
subjected to an unlimited Asiatic coolie invasion there will be no more
California.”38
Then the Examiner got into a Bay-area newspaper war with the San
Francisco Chronicle, the latter of which began trying to out-jingo its rival
by running sensational headlines:

The Yellow Peril—How Japanese Crowd Out the White

Race
Japanese a Menace to American Women
Brown Artisans Steal Brains of Whites39

Eventually, this agitation led to the passage of Alien Land Laws,

forbidding Japanese farmers from owning land. There were also national
bestsellers that supported these sentiments, such as Madison Grant’s The
Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916, which asserted:

We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which

have controlled our social development during the past
century, and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made
America “an asylum for the oppressed,” are sweeping the
nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to
boil without control, and we continue to follow our national
motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all “distinctions of
 race, creed, or color,” the type of native American of
Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of
the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo.40

A few years later, his fellow eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard published an

accompanying tome, The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat against White
World-Supremacy, which concluded:

“Finally perish!” That is the exact alternative which

confronts the white race. For white civilization is to-day
conterminous with the white race. The civilizations of the
past were local. They were confined to a particular people or
group of peoples. If they failed, there were always some
unspoiled, well-endowed barbarians to step forward and
“carry on.” But today there are no more white barbarians.
The earth has grown small, and men are everywhere in close
touch. If white civilization goes down, the white race is
irretrievably ruined. It will be swamped by the triumphant
colored races, who will obliterate the white man by
elimination or absorption. What has taken place in Central
Asia, once a white and now a brown or yellow land, will
take place in Australasia, Europe, and America. Not to-day,
nor yet to-morrow; perhaps not for generations; but surely in
the end. If the present drift be not changed, we whites are all
ultimately doomed. Unless we set our house in order, the
doom will sooner or later overtake us all.41

In December 1941, when Japan attacked the American naval station in

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, a public conditioned to tales of sneaky immigrants
posing as farmers while lying in wait to spring an invasion on the Pacific
coast was swept up in a wave of hysteria that was inflamed by military
officials who encouraged their fears, as well as a sensational press.
For a war-happy press anxious for a local angle on the conflict, the
prospect of a West Coast invasion made great-selling copy. The Los Angeles
Times ran headlines like “Jap Boat Flashes Message Ashore” and “Caps on
Japanese Tomato Plants Point to Air Base.”42 Pretty soon, everyone was
getting into the act. Reports of “signals” being sent out from shore to
mysterious unknown Japanese boats offshore began flowing in. One widely
circulated legend came from someone in Hawaii who heard a dog
somewhere along the Oahu coast and thought it was barking in Morse code
to an offshore spy ship.43
In the Seattle area, the stories were similarly ridiculous. “Arrows of Fire
Aim at Seattle” shouted the front-page headline of the Seattle Times on
December 10. It told of fields in the Port Angeles area, between Seattle and
the Pacific Ocean on the Olympic Peninsula, that had been set afire by
Japanese farmers in a shape resembling an arrow when viewed from the air;
ostensibly, the arrow pointed to the Seattle shipyards and airplane-
manufacturing plants, a likely target for incoming bombers. The Seattle
Post-Intelligencer blared a similar front-page story the next morning.
Neither paper carried any subsequent stories about the fires—which
investigators soon determined had been set by white men who were clearing
land.44
Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, the elderly commander of the West
Coast forces, encouraged these fears when he wasn’t insisting on them.
However, his clamorous appeals for devoting badly needed troops for the
defense of the West Coast were dismissed by War Department officials who
knew better; to the planners there, preparing an offensive army for
operations in Europe and the Pacific, such requests were self-indulgent
wastes of their time.45
This did not slow DeWitt, who began leading a charge to have all
persons of Japanese descent removed from the Pacific coast. As it
happened, West Coast politicians were eager to follow suit, and after
congressional hearings were held, it was decided that every Japanese person
on the coast would be rounded up and shipped to a new location in the
interior. The decisive factor was a report issued by DeWitt, who declared
the need to do so a matter of national security:

It therefore follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over

112,000 potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at
large today. There are indications that these are organized
and ready for concerted action at a favorable opportunity.
The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a
 disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be
taken.46

Two months later, every Japanese American along that corridor—indeed,

some 110,000 of them—had been rounded up and placed in a concentration
camp for the duration of the war.

________

Shortly before Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, a pamphlet

republishing a series of articles purporting to be the minutes of a late-
nineteenth-century gathering of world Jewish leaders began appearing in
Moscow and elsewhere. Titled The Protocols of the Seven Elders of Zion, it
claimed to reveal a massive plot by Jews to gradually seize control of the
world and destroy Western civilization.
It was a hoax concocted by czarist secret police for the purpose of
whipping up hatred of Jews and pogroms against them, since monarchists
blamed Jews for their defeat at the hands of the Japanese. In fact, the text
was a confabulation of previous texts, some of it straight-up plagiarism of a
satire by Maurice Joly titled Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and
Montesquieu. But it was ingenious in its construction, just vague enough to
lack verifiability, but specific and counterintuitive in ways that made the
text seem real to gullible readers. And as it emerged, there have been
millions of those.47
Among them was Henry Ford. Already having demonstrated an
inclination toward anti-Semitism, in 1920 the car-making magnate ordered
the Michigan newspaper he owned to begin publishing the Protocols in
serialized installments titled “The International Jew.” When it was finished,
he collected them into a five-volume set with the same title and sold them
for $5 each at Ford car dealerships. He sold thousands of copies.48
Ford’s sponsorship of the text created a global demand for it, and
translations appeared throughout Europe, including in Germany, where it
was promptly adopted as a core text of the young National Socialist Party,
better known as the Nazis. Adolf Hitler, the party’s leader, cited the text
regularly in his speeches and later wrote in his book Mein Kampf that even
though the Times of London had exposed the Protocols as a hoax as early as
1921, “the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they
reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner
contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.”49
Hitler’s anti-Semitism was a central aspect of his fascist politics, and as
his regime became further entrenched in power in the 1930s, the more
actively it pursued his goal of eradicating Jews from German and European
society altogether. Combined with his program of lebensraum—seizing
territory from other European states and “liquidating” its occupants in order
to create more “living space” for pure white German Aryans—the end
result became known as the Holocaust, the mass killing campaign that used
both deadly mobile assassination units and concentration camps to
manufacture death on a genocidal level. By the end of World War II and
Hitler’s defeat, he had killed more than six million Jews, along with a
couple million more members of other targeted ethnic groups, particularly
Roma, as well as homosexuals and political opponents of the fascist regime.
After the war, the Protocols became a banned text in most of Europe
and elsewhere, though it could continue to be found in dark corners of the
American publishing world where laws prevented it from being banned, but
shame had driven it underground. It remained a core text of the remnant far-
right movements in the United States, particularly the Ku Klux Klan, the
American Nazi Party, and later far-right groups such as the Aryan Nations
and the National Alliance.
By the 2000s, even these ideologues were willing to acknowledge the
Protocols as a forgery, but as with Hitler, that fact seemed irrelevant to
them. Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke acknowledged in 2014 that the
Protocols were fiction, though true like other great novels like 1984 and
Brave New World: “Although the characters and storyline in both those
works are ‘fiction,’ the idea which underlay both those books was most
certainly fact. Thus, they were works of ‘fiction’—just like the Protocols of
Zion.”50

________

It was going to be just a routine business flight. When Kenneth Arnold took
off from the airport in Chehalis, Washington, with his little CallAir Model
A airplane on June 24, 1947, en route to Yakima on the other side of the
Cascade Mountains, things were business as usual until he neared Mount
Rainier and spotted a row of flying objects.
 They appeared to him to be tracking his rate of speed, about 100 miles
per hour, and at times well outpaced him. He later described the objects as
being like “flying discs” or “saucers.” When he reached Yakima, he told
everyone he could about what he had seen, and soon the story was in all the
papers around the country. Headlines dubbed them “flying saucers.”51
Thus began the enduring mystery of unidentified flying objects, aka
UFOs. For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the objects spotted by Arnold
suddenly were seen seemingly everywhere else in the world as well, by
people whose stories were usually less credible and more fantastic with
each sighting. People produced photos of “flying saucers” that later turned
out to be thrown hubcaps or simply bad retouching jobs.52
The sensation spread to Hollywood, which produced science-fiction
thrillers like The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an alien emissary
arrives on a mission of peace in a disc-shaped spaceship, or conversely
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, in which aliens from a dying planet attack
Washington, D.C., but are eventually defeated. The airborne saucers
remained a sci-fi stereotype for decades afterward, with featured roles in
television series like The Invaders and Lost in Space in the 1960s, and even
into the 1990s in the alien-invader movie epic Independence Day.
The mystery surrounding the flying saucers never subsided, and
speculation about their possible origins not only grew outsized, but
eventually metastasized into conspiracy theories, especially as government
officials continued to deny their existence and to debunk the claims of their
existence with regularity. Combined with random reports that government
officials had in fact encountered aliens, or perhaps had alien corpses or
other evidence of their existence held in secret, the legend grew into a
cottage industry devoted to “exposing the truth” about UFOs.
A key component of the legend included the idea that a cadre of
government agents who wear dark business suits and sunglasses as their
uniforms—known generically as “men in black”—was primarily
responsible for suppression of this “truth.” Eventually, Hollywood made use
of this as well, with sci-fi television series like The X Files and movie
franchises like Men in Black depicting the exploits of these same
government agents in a mostly heroic light.
Another infamous public event—the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy in 1963—had similarly sparked a raft of conspiracy theories,
especially after the official investigation into the event concluded it had
been the act of a single man, despite seemingly contrary evidence. The high
levels of uncertainty were piqued by the intense speculation about who was
behind the death, with suspicion coming to rest on everyone from the CIA
and J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, to mob bosses angry about Kennedy’s anti-
gangster policies, and seemingly everything in between. Many of these
conspiracy theories were laden with similar tales of sunglasses-wearing
men in black suppressing evidence and quietly “suiciding” people who
spoke up.53
The industry around the UFO phenomenon never entirely went away.
The conspiracism it engendered on radio programs like Art Bell’s nationally
syndicated Coast to Coast AM show and in multiple pseudo-documentaries
and sensational books readily blended over into other theories suggesting
that nefarious government or corporate forces were secretly conspiring to
harm or enslave the public in other, often health-related, ways. In particular,
the belief that the government had secret cures for cancers locked away and
deliberately suppressed or that it was engaged in a variety of plots that were
slowly poisoning the population—through fluoridation of the water supply,
various food supplements, vaccinations, or even in chemicals in the
contrails left behind by jets—became part of the same industry, and often
their theories intersected with those involving UFOs or even old anti-
Semitic theories.
In the 1980s, for instance, a conspiracy theorist named William Cooper,
who in addition to publishing books ran a radio show based in Arizona,
published a kind of all-encompassing, hypercomplex metatheory titled
Behold a Pale Horse. It proposed that JFK’s assassination, along with a
number of other infamous mysteries, were secretly the doings of Illuminati
—who, moreover, were not people at all, but nefarious invading aliens from
another planet who were able to disguise themselves by appearing to be
human. It also proposed that the Protocols were produced by the Illuminati
and that one could easily read them as a manual for an alien takeover of the
Earth.54
Cooper’s book and radio show, as it happened, are credited with playing
a major role in the early development of the “Patriot” militia movement of
the 1990s.55

________
There was another major conspiracy-minded movement of the 1950s that
had a lasting impact, though it was aligned politically with the far right of
American politics from the beginning: namely, the anti-Communist
movement that emerged from the aftermath of World War II and the ensuing
“Red Scare” led by Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin.
An earlier Red Scare, between 1917 and 1920 that arose in the wake of
the Russian Revolution, was similarly constructed around fears of an
international Bolshevik conspiracy with designs on American democracy.56
It had produced several notable outrages against the Constitution,
particularly the passage of the Sedition Act of 1918, which targeted
immigrants as potential terrorists, and the so-called Palmer Raids, in which
federal authorities rounded up and deported suspected leftist radicals from
the Italian and Jewish communities. However, it had been rather short-lived,
cooling down especially after the attorney general for whom the raids were
named issued a national warning about an attempted coup against the
government on May Day 1920 that turned out to be completely false.57
The Red Scare that reverberates in American politics even today began
taking off in 1947, shortly after Russia and the United States ended their
wartime alliance and began the series of mutual hostilities that soon came to
be known as the Cold War. This time, there was a round of public hysteria
generated in the press about possible Communist spies handing over
American military secrets, particularly the recipe for a nuclear bomb. This
fear intensified in 1949, when the Soviets successfully tested their first such
weapon, and then became feverish in 1950, when a State Department
employee named Alger Hiss was arrested and convicted of spying for
Russia and a physicist associated with America’s own nuclear bomb was
exposed for passing key information to the Soviets. The couriers included
an American couple named Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who eventually
were executed for spying.58
The same year, Senator McCarthy spoke to a gathering of Republican
ladies in Wheeling, West Virginia, and brandished a sheet of paper upon
which, he declared, were the names of known traitors working for the U.S.
government: “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that
were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the
Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy
in the State Department,” he told them.
 The remarks sparked a flurry of national headlines for the senator and
thrust him into a leading role among the demagogues who began making
hay from the hysteria, which included congressmen like Richard Nixon of
California, who served on the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Almost overnight, McCarthy became one of the best-known politicians in
America and began using his new fame to smear his targets and political
opponents. He campaigned that fall for a Republican challenger to one of
his Democratic Senate colleagues, claiming that the incumbent—who went
on to lose by forty thousand votes—was “protecting Communists” and
“shielding traitors.”59
In 1953, McCarthy became chairman of the relatively mundane Senate
Committee on Government Operations, but he managed to twist the
investigatory powers of one of its subcommittees into a stage-managed
investigation of Communists operating within the U.S. government. He
hired a ruthless attorney named Roy Cohn as his chief counsel, and they set
about making life hell for a number of government employees, first at the
federally owned Voice of America radio network, then at the State
Department. Meanwhile, a blacklist produced by the House Un-American
Activities Committee condemned hundreds of people working in the
entertainment industry in Hollywood, including a large number of well-
known actors, directors, and screenwriters, to nearly a decade of
unemployment.60
McCarthy met his Waterloo, however, when he set out to investigate the
U.S. Army in 1954. His Senate subcommittee’s hearings were broadcast
live on national television, which was still in its infancy. Though McCarthy
exploited the heavy exposure for the opportunity to accuse a number of
people of aiding the Communist Party, in the end it did not serve McCarthy
well: the more people saw of him, the more they came to see him as a
reckless bully and a liar.61
The culminative incident generally credited with ending his career as a
demagogue came when the army’s lead attorney, Joseph Welch, responded
angrily to McCarthy’s insinuation that a young Boston lawyer was also a
Communist by saying: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.
You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have
you left no sense of decency?”62
At the end of the year, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy.
Afterward, he became a pariah in Washington and in the press, especially as
he began to drink more than he already had. He died in 1957 from liver
failure attributed to his alcoholism.
However, the legacy of the Red Scare remained vibrant and active for
the better part of the 1950s and even into the 1960s, as the Cold War
proceeded apace. The paranoia, in particular, took on a life of its own
thanks to the rise of organizations like the John Birch Society.
Founded in 1958 by candy magnate Robert Welch, the JBS—or
“Birchers,” as they became better known—immediately picked up
McCarthy’s cudgel and began beating a broad range of American
politicians with it, accusing them of being “soft” on Communism or even
“card-carrying members of the Communist Party,” as Welch was fond of
labeling his opponents, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who he
described as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”63
However, the smears were only the tip of the scapegoating spear that
was the Birchers’ main enterprise: the real heart of the organization was its
conspiracism, which distinguished it from other anti-Communist
conservatives, particularly the William F. Buckley contingent that
denounced the Society and ridiculed them as “far removed from common
sense.”64
According to Welch, “both the U.S. and Soviet governments are
controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists,
greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside
the U.S. government would betray the country’s sovereignty to the United
Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a ‘one-world
socialist government.’” Birchers developed a fixation with the UN, whose
“real nature,” they claimed, “is to build a One World Government.” All
around the nation, particularly in areas where the society was popular,
billboards sprung up with bright blue letters: “Get US Out! of the United
Nations.”65
The society became one of the earliest progenitors of health-related
conspiracy theories. First, in the 1950s, many Birchers became involved in
protesting the use of fluoride in public water supplies (a health measure that
was just then gaining prominence). They argued that it was a secret
Communist conspiracy that would surreptitiously inflict a host of ills on an
unsuspecting American public.66
Perhaps the most incisive portrayal of the John Birch Society’s mindset
was delivered in a brutal black-comedic satire, Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film
Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,
about a Bircherite general who sets off the end of the world because of his
paranoid beliefs. Trapped in his offices with a hapless British attaché played
by Peter Sellers, the cigar-chomping General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling
Hayden) explains why he sent an entire wing of nuclear-armed bombers to
attack Russia: “I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration,
Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international
Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily
fluids.” Fluoridation, Ripper explained, was “the most monstrously
conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face.”
The society revived that tradition in the 1970s, when it began promoting
claims that an apricot-seed derivative called laetrile was a secret cure for
cancer that had been deliberately suppressed by the Federal Drug
Administration. The reality was that not only were there no known clinical
benefits for cancer patients using the drug in tests, but consuming it actually
put them at risk of poisoning from cyanide, which laetrile can release in
humans when digested. Nonetheless, the JBS became involved in pro-
laetrile campaigns in at least nine states, while the pro-laetrile organization
“Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy” had a board almost
entirely comprised of people with official ties to the society.67
Through the 1960s and 1970s, the society—which largely remained on
the fringe of the national conversation due to their marginalization by
mainstream pundits—mostly recruited new members with surreptitious
evening dinners that ended with filmstrip presentations and literature, often
of leading local businessmen, with varying degrees of success. It was a
slow recruitment strategy.
Their numbers didn’t flourish, but the society’s quiet influence remained
steady over the years, particularly in rural areas. By the 1980s, they had
largely vanished from the political scene—but the roots they had created in
the preceding decades came springing back to life in a new form: militias.68
Chapter 5

A BRAVE NEW WORLD ORDER

The Militia of Montana was always kind of a low-tech operation. John

Trochmann, the founder and chief guru, liked it that way. Their meetings
were generally held in little community meeting halls, granges,
schoolrooms, small venues with a few dozen people in attendance.
Although it was the 1990s and computers with PowerPoint were still years
away, Trochmann in any event preferred using old-style overhead projectors
that used full-page transparencies, and he would shuffle through them one
by one, laying out his case.1
The room was always darkened, and the glow from the projector below
gave Trochmann’s face an ominous appearance, which fit well with the
mood of his presentation.
Trochmann’s top page read: “Enemies, Foreign and Domestic: Part I—
The Problem.” The next sheet was the cover of a military journal with a
story about international armed forces cooperating under United Nations
auspices, the illustration showing a number of nations’ flags, including the
Stars and Stripes, all subordinately positioned beneath a UN flag.
So would begin a sojourn for the audience that approached two hours in
length, as Trochmann trod through 190 pages of “documentation,” each
page a strand in a web the bearded man spins, all pieces of a puzzle
Trochmann claimed as proof of a conspiracy to destroy the United States. It
was not uncommon to hear snoring from the frequently elderly audience.
The message Trochmann was trying to convey seemed shocking enough,
but the delivery often turned into a drone.
The New World Order, he told them, is a shadowy one-world-
government group that conspires to put an end to the U.S. Constitution by
subsuming it under the “Communist” United Nations. Conspirators
included the president (then Bill Clinton), the speaker of the house, and
most financial and political leaders around the world.
The nightmarish world government Trochmann envisioned would be a
population-controlling totalitarian regime. Guns would be confiscated.
Urban gangs like the Bloods and the Crips would be deployed to conduct
house-to-house searches and round up resisters. Thousands of citizens
would be shipped off to concentration camps and liquidated, all in the name
of reducing the population.
The conspirators’ evil designs, he said, had already surfaced in
significant ways:

Gun control. “What is it about the word ‘infringe’ they don’t

understand?” Trochmann asked, referring to the Second Amendment,
which he believed completely protects people’s right to own any
weapon they want—even a missile launcher or tank.
The botched federal police raids at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco,
Texas, in 1992 and 1994 respectively. “These things prove our
government is out of control,” he would say. Moreover, Trochmann
claimed they were harbingers of a future government crackdown on
law-abiding citizens.
Troop and equipment movements throughout the country. Trochmann
flashes pictures of armored vehicles, tanks, missiles, all kinds of
military hardware—some marked with UN symbols or lettering, some
with red Russian stars. These pictures are sent in from all over the
country, Trochmann says, and the government can’t explain them.
“Unconstitutional” executive orders. These range from the inclusion of
U.S. troops among UN forces in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia under
Presidents Bush and Clinton to seemingly innocent preparations for
disaster under the Federal Emergency Management Administration
(FEMA). All, says Trochmann, are meant to undermine the U.S.
Constitution.
 Black helicopters. Reports of these black, unmarked choppers with
seemingly nefarious intentions, harassing and striking fear into the
public, were becoming more common than UFO sightings, and
Trochmann had dozens of grainy photographs he’d show his
audiences. These choppers, he said, were being used for training now.
What they’re training for, he said, was rounding up citizens and putting
them in . . .
Planned concentration camps. Trochmann came up with a list of about
two hundred sites around the country where he claimed such mass
detention centers were being constructed under the authority of the
Federal Emergency Management Administration and made a map for
his audiences. They would nod sagely.
Floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters, he said, were manmade.
Government conspirators are manipulating the world’s weather (using,
Trochmann claimed, technology at an Alaska radio project called
HAARP), causing all these horrible weather patterns that affect crop
production around the world. The intent, he said, is to induce food
shortages, which would become a pretext for imposing martial law.
That, he’d say, is when they’ll start rounding people up.

“It’s going to end up like this,” Trochmann told his audiences. “The most
mild and calm of scenarios will be: ‘Would you like to eat today? Give me
your guns. Would you like your children back from school today? Give me
your guns.’ That’s the mildest of versions you’ll see.”2
Trochmann toured the Pacific Northwest and the Inland West for much
of the 1990s, delivering these talks in a fairly uniform fashion, traveling to
places like Mount Vernon, Washington; Klamath Falls, Oregon; Orem,
Utah; or Jordan, Montana—anywhere that had a base of active “Patriots”
who would invite him to speak at their local community centers. He’d
collect a nominal speaking fee and then sell books and survival gear and T-
shirts at the tables set up around the speaking venue.
What was essential, however, was getting people to sign up for Militia
of Montana (MOM) catalogs. Once he had them on his mailing list, he was
able to sell even greater mounds of gear and goods through the catalogs
themselves, which featured a buckskin-clad sniper firing from a treetop
with an ancient rifle. It fit with Trochmann’s fantasy of a guerrilla
resistance in the manner of old colonial-era combatants, duking it out with
the federal government from their mountain retreats in the West, which he
sold relentlessly to his readers.
Inside the catalogs, Trochmann’s first few pages were often devoted to
the dozens of VHS videos he sold to his fellow Patriot movement true
believers, featuring lectures given by himself and dozens of other leading
movement figures, men such as Mark “from Michigan” Koernke, MOM
spokesman Bob Fletcher, and even mainstream political figures like
Representative Helen Chenoweth, the Idaho congresswoman who toured
the far-right “Patriot” chicken-dinner circuit speaking on behalf of the
“Sagebrush Rebellion” in the years before she first won election in 1994.
The following pages featured a full library of books, including a variety
of “survival” manuals that suggested forming independent “sovereign”
communities even before the apocalyptic downfall of society they all
expected to happen soon. Some were simple army survival manuals. Other
books detailed conspiracy theories, such as the claim that the Federal
Reserve Bank was the nexus of the New World Order plot, or another
detailing the satanic origins of Planned Parenthood, or the book devoted to
Hillary Clinton’s witch’s coven. And at the back of the catalog were various
kinds of survival gear, including gas masks and hazmat suits of dubious
provenance, as well as food-preservation systems and other items designed
to come in handy during an apocalypse.
I also encountered Trochmann’s beliefs in weather manipulation when I
interviewed him in Montana at a little roadside log-cabin café. Federal
conspirators, he assured me, had already put the mechanisms in place for
the big coup. “Most of this Emergency Powers Act that we’ve been
studying that they put together. . . . They have to have a replacement for war
to get down to those levels and still retain the legitimacy of power. What
might that be? Catastrophes to deal with? We know that
electromagnetically, they control our weather now. There’s all kinds of
documentation of that. We’ve got documentation right from the United
Nations that say that people have to get a permit to change the weather
somewhere.”3
On the big-screen TV behind us, pictures from a national broadcast
showed a hurricane slamming into Florida, and an announcer displayed the
storm’s path on a map.
Trochmann looked at the owner of the café, and they exchanged
knowing glances. “See the hurricane?” Trochmann asked him. “Boy, that’s
really late, isn’t it?” The owner nodded.
You mean, I asked, this is part of the weather-control pattern?
“Sure,” Trochmann said. “Naples, Florida, got hit at the same time
Naples, Idaho, did.”
Coincidence, maybe?
“Yeah, right,” he said. “And I have another bridge for sale for you.”

________

This kind of selective credulity—a willingness to believe the most insane,

cockamamie nonsense if it fits with or, better yet, helped open another
dimension on the nefarious nature of the conspiracy—became the
trademark of the 1990s Patriot movement and how the world of conspiracy
theories was transformed by it. Evidence—the real, factual, hard evidence
that was the meat and potatoes of JFK and UFO conspiracy theories—was
replaced with conjecture whose main value was not in its plausibility but in
how it further deepened the universe of conspiracies. Over time, this
conjecture grew ever wilder and ever less plausible.
However, the movement suffered a permanent and nearly fatal setback
in April 1995 when a Gulf War veteran and avid Patriot named Tim
McVeigh set off a truck bomb in front of the federal Murrah Building in
Oklahoma City on the anniversary of the botched Waco raid, killing 168
people, including toddlers in a day-care center. The next summer, another
Patriot terrorist, Eric Rudolph, set off a backpack bomb at the Atlanta
Olympics then, as the FBI and investigators barked up numerous wrong
trees, went on a bombing spree over the next two years that included a gay
bar and two abortion providers.4
The militia movement before then had spread like wildfire through rural
and exurban America. Trochmann’s operation was the best known and most
prominent, and it sold the three-pack of conspiracies, ideology, and gear
through its catalog as it circulated mailing lists around the United States.
Militias were especially strong in the Midwest, around Michigan and Mark
Koernke’s organizing, and they were readily adopted as a concept by
enthusiasts of the neo-Confederate ideologies in the South and the nativist
border-watching movement building slowly in the Southwest.5
But after 1995, it went into a steep decline, in large part because of its
association with domestic terrorism. However, the new brand of
conspiracism it engendered remained very much alive, thanks in large part
to a singular Patriot movement adherent and former John Birch Society
member with a little radio show out of Austin, Texas, named Alex Jones.
Jones first cut his radio chops doing Art Bell–style broadcasts focusing
on theories about the Waco raid, which he naturally declared to be evidence
of a looming police state. After the Oklahoma City bombing, he shifted
gears into fresh territory, promoting the claim—first suggested to me by
John Trochmann when I called him up the day after the bombing, even
before McVeigh’s arrest—that McVeigh’s act had been a “false flag”
operation designed to give the government an opportunity to crack down on
the Patriot movement.6
Jones continued to run with this theory, along with a number of others,
mostly regarding the United Nations and its programs for the next several
years. What he actually specialized in was regurgitating Trochmann’s old
theories: first it was the FEMA concentration camps (which Jones still
promotes to this day), and then he picked up Trochmann’s HAARP
weather-manipulation theories and ran with those; again, he still trots these
out from time to time.
Most of all, he tuned in to a number of Bircherite theories about the
health industry and cancer cures, along the lines of the old laetrile claims
but now updated to reflect new trends in cancer treatment and
understanding of consumer demands. These included theories about the
introduction of toxins into the atmosphere from jet contrails (renamed
“chemtrails”) deliberately tainted by government conspirators with
carcinogens and other body-altering chemicals.7 Some of these, according
to one of Jones’s later theories, are turning frogs gay.8
As the 1990s drew to a close, he and many others on the far-right
conspiracy fringe began pumping apocalyptic fears about the coming year
2000, primarily focused on a supposed bug inherent in all software that
would result in massive data corruption at the stroke of midnight December
31, 1999.
This “Y2K bug” was a real thing, and software companies around the
world scrambled to fix it. But in the meantime, a plenitude of theories—
mostly along the lines that the fixes would fail and all of America’s banking
and electrical infrastructure would fail and the world would shortly erupt in
the flames of mass chaos—began proliferating, particularly on the Internet.
Helping lead that charge, of course, was Alex Jones.
 As the clock wound down toward New Year’s Eve, Jones’s broadcast
became increasingly frenetic, not to mention driven by patently (and
proven) false information, all seemingly aimed at drumming up a fever
pitch of hysteria.9 The chief demon in all this, the leader of the New World
Order, according to Jones, was none other than Russian president Vladimir
Putin:

Cash machines are failing in Britain and now other European

countries. They’re finding large amounts of explosives in
France. Vladimir Putin, who is known as Vladimir the
Ruthless, using all his profanity on national TV, you name it.
We won’t read the profanity here but we’ve got it—this
person is on an unbelievable power trip and resembles a
demon. He is a creature of the IMF and the World Bank and
International Communism. He is a former KGB head and
this information is vital, ladies and gentleman.
We’re seeing the New World Order really come out in
full force. More wars than have been in the past fifty years
are going on right now. The war in Chechnya is raging in
Rosney with reports of hundreds to thousands dying.
Twenty to forty thousand civilians trapped in the city.
Russian hinds are being shot down, tanks are being blown to
bits. Massive grad unguided rocket attacks are being
launched from the city indiscriminately right now. Air and
artillery bombardments as well. It’s absolutely out of control,
it is pandemic, ladies and gentlemen.

That wasn’t all. The whole FEMA camps thing was coming true, he told his
audience.

The occupational government in Washington, D.C., has set

up a huge $50 million command bunker hooked into all the
FEMA boxes that can take over all the shortwave broadcast
and commercial AM and FM stations, as well as television
broadcast stations. And we hope they do not activate that,
ladies and gentlemen.
 Police and military are on high alert, running around,
looking for supposed boogie men and terrorists under every
rock. Military are highly visible now. Yes, ladies and
gentlemen, there are trains of military equipment moving
into Austin. Two nights ago, on Wednesday night, Fox News
reported that the airport will be used as a massive holding
facility for troublemakers or rioters here in Austin—that has
no history of riots.10

Not a word of this, of course, was true. And on January 1, 2000, everyone
woke up and went to work and brushed their teeth and their electricity was
fine and the traffic signals were fine and their bank accounts were fine and
everything mostly went along as normal, since the software companies had
done as promised and fixed the bug.
Meanwhile, the people who had listened to Alex Jones and John
Trochmann and the multitude of Patriot cohorts and had followed their
advice to prepare for the upcoming apocalypse by salting away stores of
beans and rice and water and other foods (especially the expired canned
military rations that Trochmann specialized in) were left wondering what
the hell to do with them now.
The reputation of Jones and his “Prison Planet” radio operation—soon
to be renamed “Infowars”—lingered in a kind of twilight zone until
September 11, 2001, when the worst terrorist attack on American soil in
history was perpetrated in New York and Washington, D.C., and more than
three thousand Americans were killed, which also opened up a brand new
dimension for the world of conspiracy theorists.11
Jones, naturally, was among the first to leap into the breach, claiming
that it was all a false flag, perhaps perpetrated by Israeli intelligence,
perhaps by the Bush administration itself—who knew?—but they, Jones
and his army of followers, had to investigate! Within hours—and before the
dust from the collapsing twin towers had even settled—the theories about
the secret perpetrators of the attacks began to mount and swell into a mind-
boggling pile-on.12
Over the next several years, Jones became the leading peddler of
theories generated by what they called the “9/11 Truth Movement,” but who
became known best by their short handle, Truthers. Initially the ranks of the
movement were filled with a large number of far-left conspiracists who
wanted to blame the Bush administration for the attacks, but these voices
over time were minimized and drowned out by the Infowars and other far-
right conspiracists who blamed the New World Order, for whom Bush and
his White House were merely pawns.13
As time went on, the theories became more elaborate: There were no
planes that crashed into the Pentagon; that was an illusion the conspirators
created to cover for the bomb that actually was dropped on the place. The
towers in New York couldn’t have collapsed because the melting point of
steel is much higher than burning jet fuel could have created. Over time, as
they multiplied and turned inward upon themselves, often feeding a frenzy
of competition among the theorists, the name “Truther” became the essence
of ridiculousness.14
Certainly, mainstream conservatives—despite taking on a starkly
authoritarian strain to their rhetoric as well during the invasions of
Afghanistan and then Iraq, particularly—maintained a deep divide from
conspiracy theorists like Jones, since Infowars’ biggest target at the time
was George W. Bush. Infowars’ audience kept building during these years
to numbers in the multimillions. But pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Bill
O’Reilly—the real voices of the conservative establishment—made their
loathing of the Alex Joneses of the world unquestionably clear during the
Bush years. It took the candidacy, and then the presidency, of a black man
to change all that.
In the meantime, the nativist elements of the American Right, many of
them with deep connections to those same mainstream Republicans, were
busy building their own alternative universe of conspiracy theories about
immigration down on the American borderlands. This world, too, involved
militias, mixed along with classic nativist rhetoric about an “invasion.”

________

The idea of a citizens’ border watch grew out of the longtime embrace by
the radical right of vigilante violence, à la the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, the
very first such operation was organized in 1977 by David Duke and Tom
Metzger, both longtime figures in the Klan of the 1970s and beyond.15
They called it “Klan Border Watch,” and all it really amounted to was a
photo opportunity featuring a couple of carfuls of white men in Klan robes
driving around the border crossing at San Ysidro, California, and Duke
vowing that vast numbers of men now would begin patrolling entire
stretches of the border under his command. No such force existed, of
course, and no one heard about Duke’s outfit again, though Metzger
continued running racist stunts along the border for decades afterward.16
The concept gained new life in the 1990s with the rise of the small cell
militia concept as part of a larger “leaderless resistance” against the federal
government. The main progenitor of the concept was a California man
named Glenn Spencer, who ran an outfit called American Patrol that
claimed Latinos wanted to reclaim the U.S. Southwest for Mexico as part of
Reconquista—that is, to revive the legacy of Spanish conquerors.17
The whole thing, of course, was an elaborate conspiracy theory spun, as
so many such fantasies are, out of a thin thread of factual truth woven with
reams of fabricated nonsense: A small claque of Hispanic radicals in the
1960s had suggested creating a new Latino homeland they called “Aztlan”
and even made maps outlining their dreams, which then faded mostly into
the mists of history until Glenn Spencer discovered them and began trotting
them out to his fellow nativists as proof that all these Latino immigrants
represented a conspiracy to invade the United States surreptitiously and
then take it down at a given signal. (Japanese immigrants of the 1920s
certainly were familiar with these kinds of suggestions.)
In 1999, Spencer put it like this: “The consul general says Mexico is
reconquering California. A Mexican intellectual suggests that anyone who
doesn’t like Mexicans should leave California. What else do you need to
hear? RECONQUISTA IS REAL. . . . EVERY ILLEGAL ALIEN IN OUR
NATION MUST BE DEPORTED IMMEDIATELY. . . . IF WE CAN
BOMB THE TV STATION IN BELGRADE [in the former Yugoslavia]
WE CAN SHUT DOWN [U.S. Spanish-language stations] TELEMUNDO
AND UNIVISION.”18
Around the same time, Spencer’s Voices of Citizens Together (VCT)
released a video titled Bonds of Our Nation hawking this conspiracy theory:
a Mexican invasion is racing across America “like wildfire,” Spencer told
his viewers, lamenting that there were now drugs in Iowa and gang
takeovers in Nevada, not to mention “traitors” in the Democratic Party, the
Catholic Church, and among the “corporate globalists,” which many
Patriots were now using as the euphemism for the New World Order.19
The video is a litany of vile racist tropes dating back to the nineteenth
century: these immigrants—Latinos from south of the border this time—
were bringing crime, drugs, squalor, and “immigration via the birth canal,”
threatening to overwhelm white people and decent American civilization
with their impure filth, their disease, their stupidity, their laziness.
Mexicans, he warned, are a “cultural cancer” from which Western
civilization “must be rescued.” They are threatening the birthright left by
the white colonists who “earned the right to stewardship of the land.”
And this invasion, he claimed, was not any accident. It was a well-
planned conspiracy to bring America to its knees. Working in league with
Communist Latino activists and their allies in America, Spencer claimed,
Mexico was secretly deploying a little-known but highly effective stratagem
“to defeat America.” Spencer claimed these conspirators had already
succeeded in seizing control of California.
Spencer named this conspiracy the “Plan de Aztlan.”
“Some scoff at the idea of a Mexican plan of conquest,” the video’s
narrator says, then warns that a “hostile force on our border” engaging in
“demographic war” against the United States threatens to overwhelm whites
with sheer numbers: “Mexico is moving to capture the American
Southwest.”
Spencer sent every member of Congress a copy of this videotape and
had it delivered to a number of congressmembers by Betina McCann, the
fiancée of his friend neo-Nazi Steven Barry.20
“If the Border Patrol had done its job, using the technology that is
available to us, we could stop these people,” Spencer said in an appearance
on the Donahue show. “This is an invasion of the United States!”21
Spencer moved his operations to Arizona in the early 2000s and
renamed it American Border Patrol. That was when things started to take
off for him and his border-militia concept. Taking Spencer’s cue, Casey
Nethercott, another Arizona resident, started a border-watch operation
called Ranch Rescue. They developed legal problems in short order.
Nethercott, who had done prison time in California for assault in the
1990s, and some of his fellow Ranch Rescue members in 2003 assaulted
two Salvadoran migrants who had crossed the border on foot and wound up
on a ranch where the nativist border watchers operated. The migrants were
held at gunpoint, and one of them was pistol-whipped and attacked by a
Rottweiler. With the assistance of the Southern Poverty Law Center
(SPLC), the migrants sued their attackers and won a $1 million civil
judgment against Ranch Rescue.22
 A California schoolteacher who had migrated to the Arizona desert
town of Tombstone, finding employment as an actor in the daily
reenactment of the gun-fight at the OK Corral in the town’s tourist center,
decided to join the action. In 2002 he announced he too was organizing a
border militia, hoping to stop illegal border crossings in the area south of
Tombstone. His name was Chris Simcox, and initially he named his outfit
the Tombstone Militia, but after a while he adopted a more media-friendly
name: Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.
What really motivated Simcox, he was eager to tell you, was border
security: his belief that more 9/11-style terrorists were secretly sneaking
over our borders with Mexico because, as anyone could see, it’s actually
very easy to do so if you don’t mind hiking for dozens, if not hundreds, of
miles in open searing desert. He believed “globalists” were conspiring with
government officials to leave the door open for this Trojan horse disguised
as immigrant workers.23
What was also clear was both Simcox’s overweening paranoia, as well
as the potential for real violence that ran as an undercurrent in everything he
did. Simcox was insistent that immigrants were providing cover for
terrorists crossing the border.
“It is frightening to think that just one terrorist hiding among thousands
of illegal immigrants who come across the border each day could easily
carry chemical, biological or even nuclear materials into the U.S.,” Simcox
told a reporter in 2005. “At this point, it’s not a question of ‘if’ but of
‘when.’”
Naturally, translating this paranoia into government action was the
entire purpose of his organization. “While officials are talking, Minutemen
are acting,” Simcox pronounced. “They need to put our money where their
mouth is, and start doing something about our borders.”
Simcox’s paranoia also made him volatile: “Take heed of our weapons
because we’re going to defend our borders by any means necessary,” he
told an audience in 2003. “There’s something very fishy going on at the
border. The Mexican army is driving American vehicles—but carrying
Chinese weapons. I have personally seen what I can only believe to be
Chinese troops.”24
This became the cornerstone of the right-wing belief—eventually
mainstreamed by the Republican Party—that national security is utterly
dependent on immigration police and that border crossers represent a
significant potential terror threat.
For Simcox and the Minutemen, the rubric of reason for the “citizen
border watches” they organized all revolved around “national security”—at
least when the TV cameras were on. When they were off, it was a different
story: Minutemen border watchers were fond of explaining in private to
people they thought were fellow participants that the best solution to
stopping “the invasion” (as they liked to call it) of Latino immigrants they
hoped to catch in the act was to start shooting one or two of them.
One of them even explained it on camera to a documentarian once: “No,
we ought to be able to shoot the Mexicans on sight, and that would end the
problem. . . . After two or three Mexicans are shot, they’ll stop crossing the
border. And they’ll take their cows home, too.”25
In 2004, a California nativist named Jim Gilchrist heard Simcox being
interviewed on a right-wing radio program and got the idea to make the
border watch a national callout that would last for a month on the border.
He contacted Simcox and the Minuteman project was started.26
It all came together in a big media event in April 2005 that really only
lasted about a week but drew tons of national TV coverage in the border
area south of Tombstone. About the third week into what was supposed to
be a month-long affair, everyone had pulled out. Simcox and Gilchrist, it
turned out, hated each other and barely were able to maintain a façade for
the first couple of weeks. Near the end of it, the Minutemen founders
announced they were splitting into two separate organizations.27
There was always an obvious problem with the claim that the
Minutemen were about “border security”: if that was their chief concern,
then why weren’t they focusing their efforts on the three thousand–plus
miles of border the country shares with Canada? After all, when it comes to
terrorists crossing our borders with intent to bomb—not merely entering the
United States via airport with false papers, as the 9/11 plotters did—the
only known case fitting that description was on the Canadian border: in
1999, when “Millennial Bomber” Ahmed Ressam was caught in Port
Angeles, Washington, with a carful of bomb-making material and plans for
striking Los Angeles in hand. The Ressam case is particularly instructive,
because it revealed that—in contrast to Mexico, where no al-Qaeda cells
have been known to exist—there exists an established network of Islamist
operatives in Canada.28
 Simcox, of course, had an answer for that: within a year of the
Minuteman Project’s national debut, he would be organizing citizen
watches along the Canadian border, as well, most notably in Washington
State near the crossing at Blaine. That didn’t turn out too well, either.29
It was, first of all, a mere smokescreen, as reporters found when they
ventured out to the Canada border watches. No one was out to catch
terrorists sneaking over the border (which, after all, comprised only a six-
foot-wide ditch in some places); they were there to catch reporters who
would dutifully repeat their “border security” schtick—which in turn
became the common way for nativists to describe their chief concern when
it came to immigration. It sounded innocuous and devoid of ethnic
xenophobia, when it was in truth neither.30
Because if you spent any time with these Canada border watchers, you
pretty quickly ascertained that what had them agitated was not skilled white
Canadian laborers sneaking over the border through the ports (which is
actually fairly common) but Latino immigrants sneaking over the Mexico
border. Those were the “illegal immigrants” they were out demonstrating
against.
“Border security” was just a verbal façade pasted over the real source of
these nativists’ anxieties. It was a coded phrase for the underlying intention:
“Keep out the brown people.”
Strikingly, this rhetoric gradually became embedded both in
conservative rhetoric and later, under a Donald Trump administration, into
official government policy. Republican politicians during the tenure of
President Barack Obama refused to advance comprehensive immigration
reform—the only sensible long-term solution to the problem—on the
dubious grounds that such reform needs to wait until after the border is fully
and completely secured. It’s a familiar saw: “We need to secure the border
before we can pass reform.”
Moreover, it will at best put only a dent in the problem. That’s because
about 40 percent of all undocumented immigrants come here legally to
begin with, through various kinds of visas, and then simply never leave.
Another significant percentage of them arrives through human smuggling
operations that are not deterred by fences.31
As Representative Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, told a Forbes reporter:
“Simply stated, a fence is a 14th century solution to a 21st century
problem.”32
 Moreover, insisting on emplacing “border security” before providing a
sane and legal path to citizenship for millions of immigrants is a classic
case of putting the cart before the horse. Border security is realistic only
when one’s borders are not overwhelmed, and it can’t be achieved until the
conditions that overwhelmed the Mexico border—particularly the trade
policies that damaged the Mexican economy and drove millions of people
out of work there, along with antiquated immigration laws and policies ill-
suited for a modern nation competing in a twenty-first-century global
economy—are brought under control.
Current immigration laws and policies, however, are both chaotic and
manifestly inadequate, and that’s because the toxic brand of politics
practiced by the Minutemen led inevitably to the failure of the existing
system. The border-militia movement itself also foundered, split in the
years after the big 2005 Arizona demonstration by its own innate toxicity,
amid egotistical turf wars and accusations of financial fraud and
mismanagement. It finally crumbled apart after a movement leader named
Shawna Forde (who first joined during those Canada border watches) led a
home-invasion robbery on the Arizona border that resulted in the murders
of an Arivaca man and his nine-year-old daughter in 2009.33 Other
Minutemen and border watchers have, since then, been embroiled in even
more criminality and mayhem, including another murderous rampage in
2012 in which a neo-Nazi border-watch leader in Arizona gunned down his
girlfriend and her family.34
Perhaps the final fitting coda for the whole Minutemen episode came in
2015, when Chris Simcox himself was arrested and eventually convicted on
multiple counts of child molestation involving young girls under the age of
ten, one of them being his own daughter. So much for keeping American
families safe.35

________

It didn’t take long for the white supremacists to come crawling out of the
woodwork after Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency
in February 2007. By June, a Ku Klux Klan leader named Railston Loy (he
went by “Ray Larsen”) warned that the black senator from Illinois was a
likely target for assassination: “Well, I’m not going to have to worry about
him, because somebody else down South is going to take him out,” he said.
“If that man is elected president, he’ll be shot sure as hell.”36
Neither Obama nor the rest of the country took those warnings much to
heart, and he was indeed elected president a year or so later. As his
candidacy had gained momentum, however, so did a kind of parallel
reaction among far-right conspiracists, who—failing any actual successful
plots against Obama—turned to their old standby weapon: conspiracy
theories.
Both the Internet and right-wing media—particularly Fox News—
became riddled with the spurious claims about Obama that had been
circulating well before he had even announced his candidacy, including
charges dating back to 2004 that he was secretly a Muslim. Not only did
these old smears resurface, new ones were generated partially from them:
accusations that Obama was actually a black radical, beholden to an
extremist black Chicago pastor named Jeremiah Wright, got full airings not
just on Fox News but on CNN and every other mainstream network.
Eventually, it became clear there was no truth there.37
To the eternal frustration of the people generating them, that proved true
of pretty much every other conspiracy theory cooked up during the 2008
campaign to prove Barack Obama a crook or a fraud or a radical Muslim.
For a while, theorists claimed that Michelle Obama had used the word
“whitey” in a talk that was taped—though no such tape ever surfaced.38 A
photoshopped image that was nonetheless widely believed and distributed
made Barack into a cigarette-smoking Black Panther. He was rumored to
have refused to say the pledge or to wear an American flag pin, none of it
true.39
It was during these years that Alex Jones’s Infowars operation—which
was control room central for the conspiracy-theorist world—came into its
own as an online media giant. In 2011, it was estimated that, with the
website’s ten million monthly viewers, its reach exceeded that of
established firms like The Economist and Newsweek, not to mention that the
reach of his radio show now outdid both Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.40
The spread of anti-Obama conspiracism was bolstered by the arrival on
the cultural scene of the Tea Party: an ostensibly “grassroots” conservative
resistance to the Obama administration that, for its first six months or so of
existence, was actually propped up by a combination of right-wing
corporate organizing funds and extremely heavy promotion on Fox News
and other right-wing media, which led to mainstream news organizations
dutifully following suit. Initially Tea Party gatherings helped the right gum
up the works on health-care reform (with, predictably, such conspiratorial
claims as Sarah Palin’s accusation that Democrats were planning to create
“death panels” to decide who lived and who died), but once that effort
failed and Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act was passed, the
corporate money withered away, and the TV interest dried up, too. The Tea
Party notion of an organized resistance to the Democratic presidency—
already festooned with “Don’t Tread on Me” banners lifted straight from
the Patriot movement of the 1990s—became a more genuinely grassroots
movement, spreading into the rural areas, away from the TV cameras,
where the far right was already well organized.41
Within a year or so, the Tea Party had evolved into a new, even more
reactionary phenomenon: the revival of “Patriot” militia movement ideas.42
Outside groups such as the Oath Keepers—who recruit veterans and law
enforcement officers into an organization built around conspiratorial claims
about imminent government takeovers and gun confiscations—and the
“Three Percenters,” who see themselves as the vanguard of a “second
American Revolution,” attached themselves to the Tea Party at its national
gatherings and brought a disturbing militant edge to the events.43
After being largely dormant during the George W. Bush years, the
Patriot militia movement began to reemerge even before Obama took
office: after hitting a post-9/11 low of 131 militia groups counted by the
Southern Poverty Law Center in 2007, they suddenly returned to life in
2009 with 512, ultimately reaching an all-time high of 1,360 such
antigovernment groups in 2012.44
So even after Obama was inaugurated as president, the conspiracism
didn’t slow down—and actually became worse. The belief that Obama was
secretly a Muslim simmered among Republicans quietly during the next
eight years, gaining popularity especially among the party’s evangelical
Christian bloc. By the end of his tenure in 2016, some 70 percent of
Republicans believed it.
This belief was also burnished by what became the eventual centerpiece
of the web of conspiracy theories built around Obama’s presidency: the
“birther” theory, which arose from the bogus claim that the birth certificate
the candidate had presented to both federal officials and later to the press
proving his birth in the state of Hawaii in 1961 to an American mother was
somehow inadequate (even though it was the same form any other
candidate from Hawaii would present as proof of birth on American soil, a
constitutional requirement). They claimed it was merely the “short form,”
and began demanding to see the “long form.”45
Underlying the birther theory was similarly spurious information
suggesting that Obama had actually been born in Kenya (his father’s
homeland) or that he had forsaken his American citizenship while attending
school in Indonesia as a boy (also false). Yet despite each of these theories
being sequentially disproven, the legend lived on, along with demands that
Obama reveal his true, long-form birth certificate. The signs demanding this
document were commonly seen at Tea Party gatherings.
Into this breach stepped Donald Trump.

________

Trump really had only peripheral contact with the sketchy world of
conspiracy theories before 2011, but as with everything else the publicity-
hungry tycoon did, he leapt aboard the birther conspiracy bandwagon that
year with remarkable gusto. With little previous reference to interest in the
subject—but a March poll showing him leading among potential
Republican candidates—that April, he told reporters he had “looked into”
the questions about Obama’s birth certificate and that he now believed
“there is a big possibility” the president was in violation of the
Constitution.46
“I’d like to have him show his birth certificate,” he said. “And to be
honest with you, I hope he can.”
When there was a backlash to the remarks, he doubled down and began
talking about sending investigators to Hawaii to “look into it.” It made him
a hot guest on all the TV news talk shows, and he disingenuously proceeded
as though there was no racial component to his challenge of the president’s
credentials, in spite of the claims about Obama’s previously presented birth
certificate being entirely spurious.
It became such a hot topic, both on network talk shows and on the
Internet, that President Obama—who at the time was working furiously to
get a budget resolution passed through the House—requested Hawaii
officials to release his “long form” certificate, which showed exactly the
same information as the short version but with some more details, including
the hospital in Honolulu where he was born.
Of course, this was not enough for the conspiracists. It never is enough.
In a matter of hours, Alex Jones and his cohorts were publishing claims that
the long form, too, was in fact entirely bogus. Within days, their verdict had
spread through most of the hard-core Obama-hating right, and it became
accepted wisdom. Trump, meanwhile, harrumphed—after being humiliated
by Obama at the White House Correspondents dinner a few days following
the long form’s release—that he still “wasn’t sure” that it was real. Within a
week or so, he too was claiming it was bogus.47
What few people realized at the time, however, was that in addition to
the kooky conspiracist right all leaping aboard the birther bandwagon, they
were simultaneously being joined by most of the extremists on the racist
radical right, particularly white nationalists and neo-Nazis. These racist
elements, as time went along, became some of the most ardent and virulent
promoters of the theories, particularly at racist forums like Stormfront, as
well as emerging open message boards like 4chan and Reddit, where open
white nationalists could post at will without fear of censorship. And it was
in these realms that the movement that became known as the alt-right was
born.
Trump ultimately chose not to run for president in 2011 and more or
less lay low for the next three years, occasionally popping up to promote his
friend Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s bizarre Arizona-to-Hawaii “investigation” of
Obama’s birth certificate, as Arpaio kept insisting he had proven the long
form a hoax, which of course he never actually had.48
Nonetheless, Trump’s name kept turning up high in polls speculating
about possible presidential candidates in 2015, and when he announced his
candidacy in June of that year, he did it with his usual race-baiting gusto:
denouncing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and vowing to deport them
all, he almost immediately attracted the support of the nativist anti-
immigrant factions, as well as many of the white nationalists who had
attached themselves to that movement. Indeed, nearly every SPLC-
designated hate group (there were about twenty of them) that supported
Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign actually announced their
fervid support for his candidacy within a month after he had announced, in
August 2015, his initial, draconian deport-all-twelve-million-undocumented
immigration policy (its language was later softened for general-election
consumption).49
Conspiracism was reaching a fever pitch that summer, too, with Alex
Jones playing no small role. The hysteria over Jade Helm reached its height
in mid-July that year, and it seemed to just fit with the mood of the times.
Certainly, Trump’s campaign positively bubbled with conspiracism:
Hillary Clinton, his nemesis, was portrayed as part of an “elite” who hated
the white voters Trump cultivated, and he frequently referenced
conspiracies to “rig the election.” At one point, he appeared on Alex Jones’s
Infowars program and embraced him verbally: “Your reputation is amazing.
I will not let you down,” Trump told him.50
As the election rolled along, Jones’s conspiratorial fanaticism reached
extraordinary levels. Late that summer, he went on a rant claiming that
Clinton and Obama were, in fact, demons from hell, quite literally. He told
his audience that they reeked of sulphur and that others couldn’t stand to be
around them. Hillary, in particular, inspired his visceral, purple-faced
loathing.
“That’s a frickin’ demon!” he screamed. “We’re gonna have President
Linda Blair, people, and I’m not gonna go along with it!” He looked like the
veins in his neck were going to burst.51
Near the election’s end, conspiracists poring over a raft of stolen emails
from Clinton campaign official John Podesta’s computer and released in
late October by Wikileaks discovered what they claimed were clues of an
elaborate child kidnapping-and-sex ring being run by a powerful cadre
attached to the Democratic Party and Clinton, as well as Obama. According
to these alleged clues, this global pedophilia ring—which purportedly
traded stolen children and transported them around the world so that
powerful people could have sex with them and then dispose of them
afterward—was run by Hillary and her evil cohorts out of a dungeon that
happened to be located in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington,
D.C., called Comet Ping Pong.52
This became known as the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, and it spread
like wildfire among the Hillary-hating right, despite the fact that she had
lost the election and was no longer a serious political threat to them.
Naturally, there was no dungeon at Comet Ping Pong, nor even a
basement, as a gunman from North Carolina who insisted he was only there
with his semiautomatic rifle to “personally investigate” the restaurant
during lunch hour one day in December 2016 discovered when he blasted
several rounds into a locked door in hope of finding it. It turned out to be a
broom closet. The man was arrested.53
This certainly did not stop the theory from spreading. Indeed, each
round of evidence that the theory and claims of a global pedophilia ring are
utter fictions, fantastic concoctions of right-wingers’ fevered (and
projection-prone) imaginations, only produced another round of theories
and further doubling down on the belief, spread largely through media, of
the pedophilia ring’s existence.
Indeed, it was only beginning. Pretty soon, the QAnon “Storm” would
make Pizzagate look like tiddlywinks.

________

In an online universe where conspiracy theories not only sprout like kudzu
but attract bigger audiences the more outrageous and strange they grow, it
was probably inevitable that an uber-theory like “the Storm” would become
an overnight sensation.
Part Pizzagate, part New World Order, and part hyper-partisan wishful
thinking by defenders of Donald Trump, the Storm is a sprawling meta-
conspiracy, with actors ranging from Hillary Clinton to model Chrissy
Teigen, in which everything you know about the current investigations into
Russian meddling in the 2016 election and potential collusion with the
Trump campaign is upside down.54
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in this alternative universe, is in fact
preparing to indict hundreds of Democrats (including Clinton, Barack
Obama, and financier George Soros) and Hollywood celebrities for their
roles in a massive worldwide pedophilia ring operated by “globalists” who
are conspiring to destroy Trump—and that the president himself is
masterminding this “countercoup.”
“What we have come up with is a possible coup,” explained conspiracy
theorist David Zublick in a late-November video, “not against Donald
Trump, but by Donald Trump, working with Robert Mueller to bring down
the Clintons, the Democrat Party, and the entire U.S. government involved
in pedophilia and child sex trafficking.”
In just a few short weeks in early 2018, the theory grew from a handful
of posts on fringe Internet chat forums to become the overwhelming
obsession of nearly every conspiracy theorist in the business, notably Alex
Jones and his Infowars operation, as well as social media figures such as
Liz Crokin. In addition to being a constant focus of discussion on Infowars,
dozens of YouTube videos and thousands of Twitter posts exploring various
facets of the conspiracy and presenting the usual dubious “evidence” to
“prove” it have shown up on the Internet.
The origins of “the Storm” lie in Trump’s cryptic remarks on October 6,
saying that a gathering of military leaders represented “the calm before the
storm.” When asked what he meant, Trump responded: “You’ll see.”55
Three weeks later, as New York Magazine’s Paris Martineau reported, an
anonymous poster on the Internet message board 4chan—one of the main
organizing and recruitment forums for the alt-right—who claimed he had
high-level “Q” national security clearance began publishing a series of
cryptic messages that he claimed were “intel drops” intended to start
informing the public through such channels about what was really
happening inside the White House and what Trump really meant by his odd
remarks.56
According to “QAnon,” Trump’s remark was a reference to the
indictments handed down by Mueller in late October, ostensibly related to
his investigation of the Trump campaign and its alleged collusion with
Russian intelligence. Most news reports about those indictments, reported
to number in the hundreds, presumed that they were related to criminal
behavior around the campaign.
Not so, said QAnon, who claimed that Trump was never really under
investigation. Instead, those indictments were all being directed at a
massive conspiracy involving a global pedophilia ring operated by high-
level Democrats and other “globalists” who were simultaneously part of a
plot to overthrow Trump’s presidency with a “deep state” coup.
This is the same pedophilia ring that was the focus of the Pizzagate
conspiracy theory. However, in the new expanded version of the theory, the
pedophilia ring had gone global, drawing in alleged participants from all
around the nation and occurring in locations ranging from Hollywood to
Europe. (One version of the pedophilia theory entertained by Jones claimed
that the child victims secretly were being shipped to a colony on Mars.)57
QAnon and the conspiracy theorists who piled on at 4chan, 8chan, and
on Twitter claimed that contrary to the running story in mainstream media,
this pedophilia ring is the real focus of Mueller’s investigation. The general
conclusion, spread through the #qanon hashtag on social media, was that a
wave of arrests—including Clinton, Obama, Podesta, Soros, Senator John
McCain, and a number of leading Hollywood figures and Democrats was
about to happen.
However, there was a credibility problem for QAnon early on, since he
posted in early November a scenario in which hundreds of arrests and
massive social turmoil were about to be unleashed within a matter of days.
“Rest assured, the safety and well-being of every man, woman, and child of
this country is being exhausted in full,” he wrote. “However, the
atmosphere within the country will unfortunately be divided as so many
have fallen for the corrupt and evil narrative that has long been broadcast.
We will be initiating the Emergency Broadcast System (EMS) during this
time in an effort to provide a direct message (avoiding the fake news) to all
citizens.”
November came and went, of course, without any such event. But that
didn’t dampen the enthusiasm among QAnon’s increasingly rabid horde of
fans.
These apparently included a significant portion of radical right social
media users, as indicated by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate
Tracker, which monitors the spread of extremist ideologies and claims on
Twitter. The #qanon hashtag began trending in late November and steadily
grew during the ensuing weeks. By early January, it began regularly
trending upward.58
“The Storm” reflects in many regards the need for right-wing
conspiracists to constantly push the envelope of public discourse by
proposing increasingly outrageous and arcane theories just to distinguish
themselves in an ever-more-crowded field, especially on social media and
YouTube. People who run such conspiracy mills, particularly Jones, have
built their careers around attracting attention by pushing expansively
unhinged and groundless claims.
However, the #qanon phenomenon in the context of 2018 and beyond
also suggested that the spread of conspiracy theories was (and still is) being
inflamed to the point of hypertrophy, largely through the growth of social
media as a presence in people’s daily lives. The surprising rapidity at which
“the Storm” spread among shockingly gullible people is testament to the
extent to which such claims gain real life and become widely believed.
 The hashtag’s rise on social media in late December 2017, probably not
coincidentally, happened at about the time that Alex Jones adopted the
QAnon theories and claimed them as his own: “A lot of what QAnon has
said, I had already gotten separately from my White House sources, my
Pentagon sources, my CIA sources,” he told his audience on December 24.
He went on:

We are seeing a slick countercoup to the globalists that they

are calling a coup, because the criminals that have hijacked
the country, and all their little minions that have bet on it,
were wrong. They failed. . . .
They’re calling it a coup because it’s justice. It’s the
crimes they’ve committed—the Uranium One, the
pedophilia, the money laundering, all of it, and the executive
order Trump signed to seize money connected to trafficking
in people, women and children and slaves, and money
connected to drug dealing, and all of the stuff . . . and they’re
all having to step down right now, and that’s just the
beginning.
So “the Storm” is real. That’s our storm of justice and
resistance and standing up.59

Infowars correspondent Jerome Corsi—the longtime conspiracy maven

responsible for many of the nonsensical claims about Obama’s birth
certificate as well as a host of other similarly flimsy theories—chimed in
shortly with an “intelligence analysis” of QAnon’s posts, from which he
concluded that the anonymous poster was “legitimate,” that is, someone
genuinely working from within the White House with real knowledge of
inside information.60
“The Storm is upon us,” Corsi told an interviewer, continuing:

2018 will be the year of the counterattack that Donald Trump

is going to wage against the deep state. This is going to be a
battle of enormous proportions which will determine
whether or not the American republic as a constitutional
republic sustains or does not. Depending upon Donald
 Trump’s success or failure, we will have a coup d’état which
will replace the Constitution with a globalist, socialist state.
This is a battle of classic heroic proportions, which is
going to be waged on the intelligence front and the average
American person would be unaware of it had there not been
an entity like QAnon who had come forward from a
knowledgeable position to start dropping the clues, the
breadcrumbs, as he says, that will lead people to the research
they need to do and the understanding they need to achieve
to see how our intelligence agencies, our justice system, the
FBI have been corrupted and how dangerous this is. The
republic is hanging by a thread and it’s now going to be
Donald Trump’s unique opportunity to save it and I don’t
think there is anybody better that I can think of in the
political landscape to be on the scene than Donald Trump.

Sprinkled in and subsumed under the rubric of “Storm” theories were a

number of strangely associated theories, such as one positing that the Las
Vegas shooter was actually an inside job carried out by Saudi-sponsored
false flag terrorists or another claiming that the dossier compiled by a
British intelligence agent on the Russian activity was a complete fabrication
bought and paid for by Obama and Clinton. Within the 4chan and 8chan
communities, a debate arose over whether children were being raped as part
of a satanic conspiracy or a CIA blackmail scheme.
In many regards, however, the Trump countercoup component of the
“Storm” was almost secondary to the overarching conspiracy theory that
has been fueling much of the passion and animus accompanying its spread
on social media—namely, the uber-Pizzagate belief that there is a massive
conspiracy afoot in America to abduct, rape, and murder hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of children to satiate the appetites of a satanic cabal operating at
the highest levels of government.
Jones described the evil nature of this cabal to his audience in
December:

They literally created an army of people they can control

who wanted to have sex with children and be evil, and who
 they could destroy at any time. And what’s even sicker is the
people above that aren’t even into raping kids. They just
want to kill kids. The lesser vampires just want to feed off
their energy and rape them. These people want to kill them.

Then there was Liz Crokin, the onetime gossip columnist turned
“investigative reporter” who writes for TownHall.com and has a large
following on social media, in large part due to her long-running claims that
pedophilia is rampant in America. She not only believes that QAnon is a
legitimate inside information source, but that it actually is Trump himself,
perhaps with the help of key aide Stephen Miller.61
She told an interviewer that she thought the president and his team had
been doing “intel drops” at 4chan and 8chan and on social media as a way
of red-pilling members of the public to soften the inevitable shock that will
accompany the wave of arrests that’s coming:

Now, I believe Q is President Trump, working possibly with

Stephen Miller, to drop this information behind the scenes to
get a campaign going, to red-pill people as to what is going
on with the Storm, and their takedown of the Deep State,
which includes the Deep State pedophile scene. I’ve been
telling people for a very long time the stuff that goes on with
these elitists, these occult elitists, who literally are raping,
sacrificing children, drinking blood, like eating babies
literally. It’s too hard for an average person that has no idea
that any of this is going on to take it in all at once.
So there’s been a very orchestrated effort behind the
scenes by President Trump and his administration to slowly
wake up the public as to what, that (A), this goes on, that it’s
real, and (B), that they’re taking down these people. When
there are mass arrests, and there are names like Hillary
Clinton that pop up, or thrown in prison for sex trafficking,
there’s not mass hysteria. People will realize, “Oh my gosh,
maybe this is real,” or like, this isn’t just some kind of coup
or whatever, this is real and this is really going on.62
Crokin was nothing if not indiscriminate in accusing people of participating
in the pedophilia conspiracy, notably including well-known entertainment
figures. In late December 2017, she tangled on Twitter with supermodel
Chrissy Teigen and her husband, the Grammy-winning singer John Legend,
claiming that pictures Teigen posted of her children indicated they were
participants in the Pizzagate ring.
Teigen responded with a tweet indicating she was “disturbed” by
Crokin’s accusation. “Chrissy you run in circle with people who rape,
torture & traffic kids. This is a fact, I expose sex trafficking for a living,”
responded Crokin.
Teigen replied angrily: “YOU POSTED MY DAUGHTER AND HAVE
50,000 PEOPLE ACCUSING ME OF BEING IN A PEDO RING. I don’t
care HOW you backtrack or WHAT you deleted. I have it ALL. I’m the last
person you are f***ing with. You are DONE with me and my family. You
are going to court.”
Legend chimed in: “You need to take my family’s name out of your
mouth before you get sued.”63
In the QAnon universe, the conspiracies kept building and building over
time, especially as the person or people behind the Q persona posted at
8chan. So did the bizarre fanaticism of the theory’s true believers.
A later iteration of the theories revolved around the mysterious jail
suicide of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, a friend of both Bill Clinton and
Donald Trump (and many other celebrities and political figures) who was
accused by multiple women of overseeing a massive sex-trafficking
operation involving mostly underage girls, as well as personally assaulting a
long list of these girls. Epstein, awaiting trial in New York, was found dead
in his cell in July 2019, and the official verdict declared that he had hung
himself.
Many people were skeptical of this conclusion (one poll found that less
than a third of Americans believed Epstein killed himself),64 but conspiracy
theorists—particularly those convinced that Bill Clinton had a track record
of murdering his political enemies and liabilities—went completely wild.
This was especially the case for the QAnon theorists for whom the Clintons
were central villains in their narrative; the possibility that Trump might
have been responsible was not part of the discussion.
In short order, one of the most popular memes that first circulated in
QAnon social media circles—the simple assertion, “Epstein Didn’t Kill
Himself”—spread quickly into the mainstream, where it was circulated
through the likes of Fox News and Republican congressmen who shared it
with the public.65
To no one’s great surprise, the unhinging effect common to far-right
conspiracy theories began manifesting itself in the real world. An out-of-
work Marine veteran named Matthew P. Wright—armed with an AR-15
rifle, a handgun, multiple magazines of ammunition, and a flash-bang
device—drove his homemade armored vehicle to the middle of the Mike
O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge leading to the Hoover Dam one
day in July 2018 and successfully blocked traffic for ninety minutes,
complete with an armed standoff with law enforcement, at the end of which
Wright was apprehended unharmed.66
It shortly emerged that the whole event had been inspired by Q. Locked
up in Mojave County, Arizona, Wright composed a series of letters to
President Trump and other elected officials that all signed off with the
secret Q insiders motto, “Where We Go One We Go All.” His letter to
Trump referenced another Q belief—namely, the “Great Awakening,”
which was just another signifier for the “Storm” that Q believers still
anxiously awaited.67
QAnon signs appeared on bumper stickers and on signs in people’s
yards. They would appear at Donald Trump’s periodic rallies at various
locales around the country, with followers wearing large “Q” signs and T-
shirts adorned with variations on “#WWG1WGA.”
Trump would even appear to acknowledge the QAnon believers from
time to time—giving them the “thumbs-up” at his rallies, while Press
Secretary Sarah Sanders denied any support. However, inside their own
universe, QAnoners had become fully convinced that Trump in fact was
secretly linked to Q, and he sent them all kinds of secret signals—gestures
and phrases Trump would use, seemingly odd coincidences in his public
appearances—as absolute proof that not only was Trump in on the plot-
within-the-plot, but that indeed his invisible hand could be found in almost
any and every news event, White House–related or not.
A well-known QAnon YouTuber named Michael Lionel Lebron one day
posted a photo of himself in the Oval Office with President Trump and his
wife, with just the script: “There are simply no words to explicate this
profound honor.” Lebron assured his followers that the president definitely
knew about the QAnon conspiracy, though he later claimed that they didn’t
explicitly talk about it. No one could explain how or why he was in the
Oval Office—which would have required clearance by senior staff—in the
first place.68

________

Conspiracy theories not only crept into the Oval Office during Trump’s
tenure, at times they appeared to rule the place, long after birtherism
withered into the nothingness from which it was born. And if the Jade Helm
incident had demonstrated how conspiracy theories can affect and alter
policies and official behavior, the Trump administration’s conduct
demonstrated what happens when the entire executive branch is in their
thrall.
In August 2017, the magazine Foreign Policy published a memo by a
man named Rich Higgins, who served on the staff of Trump’s National
Security Council. It was titled simply “POTUS and Political Warfare,” and
it opened with the assertion that the president was actually engaged in a
conflict with nefarious cultural Marxists in a conspiracy.

This is not politics as usual but rather political warfare at an

unprecedented level that is openly engaged in the direct
targeting of a seated president through manipulation of the
news cycle. It must be recognized on its own terms so that
immediate action can be taken. At its core, these campaigns
run on multiple lines of effort, serve as the non-violent line
of effort of a wider movement, and execute political warfare
agendas that reflect cultural Marxist outcomes. The
campaigns operate through narratives. Because the hard left
is aligned with Islamist organizations at local (ANTI FA
working with Muslim Brotherhood doing business as MSA
and CAIR), national (ACLU and BLM working with CAIR
and MPAC) and international levels (OIC working with
OSCE and the UN), recognition should be given to the fact
that they seamlessly interoperate at the narrative level as
well. In candidate Trump, the opposition saw a threat to the
“politically correct” enforcement narratives they’ve
meticulously laid in over the past few decades. In President
 Trump, they see a latent threat to continue that effort to
ruinous effect and their retaliatory response reflects this
fear.69

It even had an explanation for the president’s various personal scandals,

including an audiotape in which he talked about grabbing women “by the
pussy,” as well as a payoff to a porn star who says they had sex while
Trump’s third wife Melania was pregnant:

Responding to relentless personal assaults on his character,

candidate Trump identified the players and the strategy:
“The establishment and their media enablers will control
over this nation through means that are very well known.
Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a
racist, a xenophobe, and morally deformed.”—President
Trump, Oct 2016
Culturally conditioned to limit responses to such attacks
as yet another round in the on-going drone from diversity
and multicultural malcontents, these broadsides are
discounted as political correctness run amuck. However,
political correctness is a weapon against reason and critical
thinking. This weapon functions as the enforcement
mechanism of diversity narratives that seek to implement
cultural Marxism. Candidate Trump’s rhetoric in the
campaign not only cut through the Marxist narrative, he did
so in ways that were viscerally comprehensible to a voting
bloc that then made candidate Trump the president; making
that bloc self-aware in the process. President Trump is either
the candidate he ran as, or he is nothing. Recognizing in
candidate Trump an existential threat to cultural Marxist
memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative, those
that benefit recognize the threat he poses and seek his
destruction. For this cabal, Trump must be destroyed. Far
from politics as usual, this is a political warfare effort that
seeks the destruction of a sitting president. Since Trump took
office, the situation has intensified to crisis level proportions.
 For those engaged in the effort, especially those from within
the “deep state” or permanent government apparatus, this
raises clear Title 18 (legal) concerns.

According to Higgins, those threatened by Trump include “‘deep state’

actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans.”
Among the people whom he considered disloyal to Trump, he named
National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, his boss. Higgins was promptly
given a pink slip.70
This, it shortly emerged, thoroughly infuriated Trump, who had gushed
over the memo when it was given to him. A month later, he was “still
furious” about the firing. The incident clearly indicated that the president,
too, subscribed to the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory.71
Moreover, the paranoiac and conspiratorial view of its author was
clearly pervasive throughout the Oval Office in nearly every policy
initiative Trump pursued. Nowhere was that more true than with the raging
debate over immigration.
From the start, accompanying the nativist rhetoric with which he had
announced his candidacy in 2015 and continuing through both the
campaign and his tenure as president, Trump’s view of immigration was
straight out of the Minutemen’s paranoid playbook: the border’s porousness
was a threat to national security, because terrorists were secretly crossing
into the United States there, and the immigrants were just a cover for them
and they were destroying the culture anyway.
However, the Minutemen’s grand plan to build a fence on the border
(remember, that had been a scam, too) was not grand enough for Trump.
No, his plan had to bigger. Better. He would build a wall! And indeed, “the
Wall” became one of the centerpieces of Trump’s campaign, the chant
“Build the Wall!” ringing loudly at all his campaign rallies.
Once in office, not only did he pursue policies that emphasized the
dehumanized view of immigrants inherent to conspiracy theories, which
produced a family-separation policy that put large numbers of children in
wire cages at detention centers, but eventually Trump publicly embraced
conspiracy theories about the people coming to the American border.
So in October, with midterm elections just a few weeks away and the
polls (accurately) looking grim for Republican chances of retaining the
House of Representatives, Trump turned back to his tried-and-true formula
that he believed won the election in 2016: fearmongering over
immigration.72
And this time, it came with a conspiracy-theory twist.
On October 16, Trump tweeted out the alarm: “The United States has
strongly informed the President of Honduras that if the large Caravan of
people heading to the U.S. is not stopped and brought back to Honduras, no
more money or aid will be given to Honduras, effective immediately!” It
was just one of many the president posted that day on the subject and in the
days following, as well.73
He had been spurred to action by a Fox News segment that had run that
morning about a caravan of migrants, several hundred strong, from Central
American nations who planned to seek asylum in the United States and
were gradually making their way northward. Though nearly all of these
refugees in fact were fleeing violence in their homelands and many likely
would qualify for asylum in normal circumstances, Trump—with powerful
assists from right-wing media, particularly Fox—persistently portrayed
their gradual approach as an imminent existential threat to the United
States.
The most hysterical pundit was Fox Business’s Lou Dobbs, who
trumpeted false information about the caravan nightly on his program for
most of the month.74 He hosted a guest named Chris Farrell, from a far-right
Beltway organization called Judicial Watch, who solemnly informed Dobbs
with great certainty that the caravan was being “orchestrated by the Soros-
occupied State Department.”
A guest on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show opined: “These
individuals are not immigrants—these are people that are invading our
country.” Another chimed in that they sought “the destruction of American
society and culture.”75 Even on CNN, the same rhetoric ruled: right-wing
commentator Matt Schlapp got aggressive while interrogating host Alisyn
Camerota: “Who’s paying for the caravan? Alisyn, who’s paying for the
caravan?” Then he answered his own question: “Because of the liberal
judges and other people that intercede, including George Soros, we have too
much chaos at our southern border.”76
At one point, Trump retweeted a video, first posted by Republican
Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, purportedly showing caravan
participants receiving money that was being handed out in bundles. Gaetz
speculated in his original post that the money might have come from
George Soros. Trump asked: “Can you believe this, and what Democrats are
allowing to be done to our Country?”77

________

A still taken from another Fox News video that seemed to show a Star of
David sticker on the back of the cab of a truck hauling food for the caravan
migrants also made the rounds quite a bit. It was particularly popular on the
dark corners of social media, on white nationalist and neo-Nazi message
boards where it was displayed widely as proof that the Jews were secretly
behind the caravan. It was everywhere on Gab, which had become the
social medium of choice for white nationalists and other bigots after being
kicked off Twitter.78
One of the people who spread this photo was a forty-six-year-old white
Pittsburgh-area man and heavy Gab user named Robert Bowers. At one
time he had been a relatively normal employee at a local bakery, but he had
drifted for years after leaving the job in 2002, taking up work as a long-haul
trucker and finding odd jobs here and there. His neighbors at his apartment
in Baldwin Borough said they hardly ever saw him.
His computer and social media records, though, showed that Bowers
had developed an interest in the deeply bigoted Christian Identity
movement, which preaches that white people are the true children of Israel,
that today’s Jews are actually demonic imitators descended from Satan, and
that nonwhite people like blacks, Asians, and Latinos are soulless “mud
people” whose humanity is of secondary value at best. He burnished these
ideas with conspiracy theories and other far-right propaganda at message
boards like 4chan, the Daily Stormer, and Stormfront.
On Gab, his anti-Semitic rants were visceral and angry. And as the
month of October went on and the caravan dominated the news, his rhetoric
grew threatening.
He reposted a message that Western civilization is “headed towards
certain extinction within the next 200 years and we’re not even aware of it.”
A Jewish relief organization called the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society
became the focus of Bower’s ire: “You like to bring in hostile invaders to
dwell among us?” he posted in a comment directed at HIAS.
Bowers also facetiously thanked HIAS for a post listing groups that had
supported one of the organization’s refugee benefits. “We appreciate the list
of friends you have provided,” he wrote.
On Saturday, October 27, he published a final post. “HIAS likes to bring
invaders in that kill our people,” he wrote. “I can’t sit by and watch my
people get slaughtered. Screw your optics. I’m going in.”79
One of the Jewish congregations on that earlier HIAS fundraising list
met at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, located in the same Squirrel Hill
borough that once was known around the world as Mister Rogers’
Neighborhood. After filing his post, Bowers got in his car and drove the
thirty minutes or so it took to get to Tree of Life.
He had a Colt AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and three pistols with him. He
got out of his car and entered the synagogue. There were about seventy-five
people inside beginning their morning Shabbat service. He opened fire with
the AR-15 but, over the course of the next ten minutes or so, wound up
using all four of his weapons.
The first people he killed were two elderly Jewish men who had turned
to greet him; others were in their seats as he walked toward the front. The
room cleared quickly, leaving only a scattered few targets, so he began
shooting at people making last-second dashes out of the room.
Police arrived about ten minutes after he opened fire. Bowers then
opened fire on the police, engaged them in a standoff for about thirty
minutes, and surrendered.80
There were eleven dead, most of them elderly, and six people were
injured, four requiring surgery. Bowers now awaits trial in Pittsburgh.
Over at 4chan, where a number of users on the /pol/ board remembered
Bowers from his time spent there, the popular view was that the attacks
were “accidentally red-pilling” people. Others denied the attack, claiming it
was a false flag done by Jews to gain sympathy and that somehow Bowers
had fallen prey to their machinations. They created a hashtag for him:
#HeroRobertBowers.81
Chapter Six

THE RABBIT HOLE

It feels almost like a drug, the rush from learning and delving a new
conspiracy theory. It’s so powerful, so affirming, so empowering that of
course you come back for more. Who wouldn’t? That’s why they call it
red-pilling, right?
First, it’s the secret knowledge. Only you and a select few have
gleaned this information. The Powers That Be don’t want it to be known.
But it gives you special insight. You can see how things really work. You
can see things at work that others can’t.
Because you’re smarter and cleverer than them. This is part of the
ego boost: It’s a rush seeing evidence of your superiority to others so
clearly. The old word for the people who aren’t as insightful or fortunate
as you is sheeple, but nowadays the word is normies. Either way, they are
objects of contempt.

Even before there was an Internet, the core appeal of conspiracism was the
feeling of empowerment that came with it. But in the new age of social
media, the “new conspiracism”—the kind without evidence, built on a
combination of pure conjecture and a backlog of older conspiracy theories
that act as a kind of body of knowledge separate from normal rules of
evidence and factuality—that thrives and spreads in supposedly web-savvy
environments is in many ways susceptible to manipulation thanks to its
insistence on cynicism.
A lot of this has to do with what actually happens to us when we use
social media. Brain scientists have found that certain kinds of stimulation
on the Internet, particularly affirming and empowering responses people
receive in their interactions, arouse certain pleasure response centers in the
human brain, triggering the release of dopamine, a chemical messenger that
travels along a reward pathway, making you feel good. That’s why it
becomes so addictive.
When you’re on social media a lot and you’re not getting those reward
responses as frequently as you’d like, it all turns very negative. One
German study found that one out of three people surveyed felt “lonely,
frustrated or angry” after spending time on Facebook, often due to
perceived inadequacies when comparing themselves to friends.1 People
often found themselves negatively comparing themselves to the happy lives
they’d find their “friends” (most of whom, in fact, are actually strangers)
sharing online.
This experience negatively affects people’s self-esteem in often
profound ways, making them feel low self-worth, particularly when it
comes to their sense of agency in the world at large. In the great teeming
world of social media, it’s very easy to feel like a complete nobody. Unless,
of course, you can find a way to make yourself a somebody.
People who fall into this pattern of thinking become susceptible to
conspiracy theories precisely because they feel they have found a shortcut
to empowerment that only the clever can seize. The theories are a way of
reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.
Samantha Kutner, a researcher who tracks the far-right Proud Boys
street-brawling organization, says that most of the young men she’s
interviewed have described their “red-pilling” journey beginning with a
kind of “cognitive closure” derived from “having seemingly random things
explained in some grand overarching narrative.”2
“I think there’s an information addiction component to it as well,”
Kutner says. “You could think of it as being addicted to bad information
that you don’t see as bad.”
 The power of conspiracy theories, University of London psychology
lecturer Rob Brotherton explains, is their ability to “connect the dots,” to
help people make sense of the seemingly random events in their lives by
creating a pattern: “the cognitive equivalent of seeing meaning in
randomness.”3
“It’s incredibly empowering to believe you have the true picture of
reality and that everyone else is delusional,” observes Nancy Rosenblum, a
Harvard politics professor who has been cataloguing the costs of
conspiracism in her recent work. “And if you look at conspiracists today,
even the wackiest, like those writing about QAnon, they see themselves as
the cognoscenti. They understand how the world really works, and they
understand that the rest of us are brainwashed.”4
However, this alienation is never ameliorated by the continuing descent
down the rabbit hole; rather, the more isolated its inhabitants become, the
more likely they are to become angry, perhaps violent.
The larger problem in all this is that the attitudes and assumptions that
underlie conspiracism are common human traits—failings, perhaps, but also
woven into the warp and weft of our cultures, particularly in the United
States, where (as Reason editor and author Jesse Walker has helpfully
explored) our Founding Fathers were themselves prone to a paranoid streak
about conspiratorial elites, some of it well-founded, some of it fantasy.5
“Cognitive and political psychologists will tell you the cognitive
afflictions that result in the worst and most zealous kind of conspiracy
theory really are common; we all share them,” observes Rosenblum. “We
like to think that agents are the causes of things, rather than accidents or
unintended consequences being the cause. We like to think there’s a
proportionality between cause and effect, and that causes us to overreach
for explanations.”6
Brotherton explains that we know that “conspiracism is about more than
mere evidence” in large part because the very fabric of the theories—
namely, the seemingly random, disconnected events that are then woven
into a pattern—is rarely, if ever, interpreted as the product of what we
rationally already know about real conspiracies—namely, that they are by
nature limited in scope, number of actors, length of time, and breadth of
purpose. When a scenario falls outside those parameters, the likelihood of
its being real is infinitesimal.7
 Anyone committed to a rational exploration of an event—especially a
highly public one, such as JFK’s assassination or 9/11—would consider the
possibility that unrelated conspiracies planned by independent groups with
their own idiosyncratic motives and goals were involved. That never
happens: “Instead, conspiracy theorists have a remarkable knack for
weaving a multitude of seemingly unrelated events together, into a single
rich tapestry,” Brotherton observes.8

________

What makes conspiracy theories feel so empowering is that they bring order
to chaos, make sense of events that don’t. Facts and arguments built upon
them are not just meaningless, they actually reinforce the conspiracist
narrative, becoming proof that the conspiracy has reached monstrous levels
for the believers. With “new conspiracism” particularly, the theories really
are no longer based on facts—which is why their believers are immune to
them.
Looking for and finding the patterns that have replaced facts in their
epistemological universes really become the central preoccupations of
people drawn into this alternative universe. This came up during a 2008
experiment by researchers Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky9 in which
researchers asked participants to compose a short essay, after which they
would complete a variety of tasks.

Half of the participants wrote about a time they lacked

control over their lives, while the others described a time
when they were in control. This task was meant to induce a
feeling of having or lacking control—and a lack of control is
thought to be a troubling psychological state that people are
motivated to resolve. In follow-up tasks, the participants
who had been manipulated to feel a lack of control were
more likely to see patterns in noise, to make superstitious
inferences about connections between events, and to
perceive sinister conspiracies in ambiguous situations.
Psychologists theorize that drawing connections and
recognizing patterns in this way can help to restore a sense
 of control and certainty—to make sense of a world that, in
that moment, seems difficult to predict or understand.10

This is why, for someone who operates in the workaday world outside
the realm of conspiracy theories, coming into contact with a conspiracy
theorist can be deeply unsettling, as though the whole ground of reality
shifts like a weird field around them. Certainly trying to have logical
conversations with them can leave people feeling discombobulated.
Philadelphia activist Gwen Snyder tracked the radicalization arc
reflected in the Facebook timeline of a local man named Tom who began
harassing and threatening her on Twitter. Snyder went through his Facebook
“likes” chronologically and found that they told a story.
“Tom didn’t start out as a guy who went around threatening to murder
the loved ones of anyone who dared to criticize politicians for associating
with white supremacists,” she wrote. “He was an army vet who supported
police. He watched the local Fox channel, sure, but he was as into the
Beatles and hardwood floors just as much as he was into the cops. He even
went out of his way to like his neighbor’s African braiding salon.”11
However, at some point, Tom changed, primarily when he discovered
Fox News. Shortly after that, his timeline began sporting “likes” for the
Conservative Tribune, for right-wing pundit Judge Jeanine Pirro, for right-
wing news site NewsMax, and then for Donald Trump. Next came Breitbart
News. “Soon, Tom is liking Steve Bannon’s stuff, ICE, local anti-sanctuary
politicians, white nationalist French candidate Marine Le Pen. And of
course, Ben Shapiro.”
What happened next was predictable: all these voices “bridged the gap,”
and in short order Tom was liking 4chan and 8chan and a number of alt-
right websites, as well as a page dedicated to “Three Percenter” militiamen.
He also linked up with local Republican politicians, including the mayoral
candidate over whom Tom had threatened Snyder. And he posted on
Twitter, defending the Proud Boys: “The Proud Boys aren’t what you think.
They’re just some big dudes daring you Antifa snowflakes to swing a chain
at them, or a pipe. Then, it’s lights out.”
Tom, now fully red-pilled, also became a full-on QAnon believer,
posting tweets threatening Hillary Clinton for allegedly posting “coded
assassination threats” against Trump.
 Political scientist Joseph Uscinski explains that epistemology—the
system of how we know things—works in an entirely different way for
conspiracists:

It isn’t just that conspiracy theorists have a different set of

explanations, it is that their explanations call into question
our knowledge-generating and knowledge-disseminating
institutions. The establishment, in order to maintain control
and function, must specify the parameters under which
society is to operate; this includes stipulating the relevant
facts and the methods of discovering those facts. Conspiracy
theories undermine the establishment by providing
alternative facts, realities, and ways of knowing. The
bedrock factual matters people should be able to agree upon
—such as facts about how society is organized—are often
contested by conspiracy theorists.12

Normal reason and logic, in other words, don’t work to persuade

conspiracy theorists because they don’t believe in them anymore; the shared
reality that arises from those norms doesn’t really exist for them. We all
share the world, but conspiracists experience it in a very different way.

________

Buying into a conspiracy theory is a ticket into a realm, a reality unto

itself, defined not by stodgy authorities issuing “official” stories to
explain events unconvincingly but by clever “researchers” who seem to
dig up nuggets of obscure information from all over that not only make
the “official” story seem dubious but suggest an entirely different, and
much more nefarious, narrative.
And the best part of this narrative is that it offers you hope—hope to
become a hero yourself, to outsmart the evil plotters, to save your
families and friends from their schemes. You only have to research it
further and soon you will get to the bottom of everything.
Part of the addictive quality of conspiracy theories is finding yourself
joining the “researchers”—spending time on search engines looking up
 tidbits of information that might help bolster your theory of interest.
When you share it online, you wait and hope for approbation, lots of
shares, and the rush that comes with that.
What you soon notice inside the rabbit hole is the way that your
favorite theory, the one you spend your time researching, seems to
connect with other conspiracy theories that come from completely
different realms. How a theory about FEMA concentration camps
connects weirdly with a completely different theory about Hillary’s
pedophilia ring, or how a long-forgotten tidbit about JFK proves Obama
couldn’t have been born in Hawaii. It’s amazing what you find when you
start digging through all the suppressed information.
One rabbit hole leads to another, downward into the maze, which
becomes a realm unto itself. Your system of conspiracist beliefs begins
growing, layer upon layer, like an onion. It becomes more complex and
interconnected and filled with data from all kinds of sources, most of
them dismissed by mainstream media, because of course they are. Who
do you think runs the media?

________

The alternative universe of conspiracism may be ultimately the product

of a mass of feverish imaginings by hundreds of different people, but it has
rules.

First, whoever is involved in the conspiracy is evil and their intentions

nefarious. The people who are identified as leaders of the plot—such
as George Soros or Hillary Clinton—are seen as not merely immoral
but demonic. Opposing them is a noble, heroic act, performed by
ordinary but morally superior citizens.
Second, the people who publicize and research the conspiracy are
innately the objects of persecution by the conspirators—and innately
the heroes who will save the world from these evil plotters.
Third, any “official” version or explanation of the story is necessarily
false, while a wide variety of alternative, conspiracism-fueled versions
may compete but are broadly deemed plausible. At the same time, the
only facts deemed accurate and true are those that can be interpreted as
proving or supporting a conspiracist explanation or adding to it. A
 nihilistic kind of selective skepticism arises in which any simple or
clear explanation is disbelieved, while, conversely, any odd “fact” or
alternative interpretation that supports a conspiracy narrative is seized
upon with avid gullibility.
Fourth, nothing is accidental. It’s all intentional, and it all ties together.
Indeed, a corollary aspect of this rule is that the conspirators
themselves are phenomenally competent and mind-bogglingly clever
in everything they do, not to mention overwhelmingly powerful,
wealthy, and connected.
Fifth, some theories may be ultimately rejected and discarded when
they turn out to be unsustainable, such as claims that global climate
change is a hoax, but that does not alter the larger conspiracist
narrative to which the true believers rigorously adhere.
Finally, any attempts to present contrary evidence is inherently proof
that the conspiracy exists, and any such evidence is automatically
presumed to be false or distorted. The people who embrace such facts
are either active members of the conspiracy or hapless dupes.

These six rules are what psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky calls the
parameters of “conspiracist ideation,” the means by which conspiracy
theorists create their own self-reinforcing universe. In this world, he writes,
“nothing is as it seems, and all evidence points to hidden agendas or some
other meaning that only the conspiracy theorist is aware of.”13
Conspiracists are by nature untrusting of others, Lewandowsky says,
which is why “contrary evidence is often interpreted as evidence for a
conspiracy. This ideation relies on the notion that, the stronger the evidence
against a conspiracy, the more the conspirators must want people to believe
their version of events. This self-sealing reasoning necessarily widens the
circle of presumed conspirators because the accumulation of contrary
evidence merely identifies a growing number of people or institutions that
are part of the conspiracy.”14
University of Kent psychology lecturers Michael Wood and Karen M.
Douglas explain: “If you want to know how seriously someone takes
conspiracy theories, you should ask about how much they trust others,
whether they are agreeable or open-minded, how much they think people
are out to get them, and whether they routinely have unusual or paranormal
experiences. Conspiracy theorizing may be driven in part by evidence, but
is certainly driven by underlying psychological tendencies.”15
“Whether conspiracy theories reflect what’s really going on in the world
or not, they tell us a lot about our secret selves,” observes Rob Brotherton.
“Conspiracy theories resonate with some of our brain’s built-in biases and
shortcuts, and tap into some of our deepest desires, fears, and assumptions
about the world and the people in it. We have innately suspicious minds. We
are all natural-born conspiracy theorists.”16
The driver in all this, analysts consistently find, is people’s sense of a
lack of agency in the real world at large—a perfectly reasonable feeling,
given the overwhelming numbers of humanity and the ease with which
people become not just anonymous but disempowered economically and
socially in modern mass society. On social media, this often translates into a
syndrome long identified as a core reason people dive into these rabbit
holes—namely, fear of missing out (FOMO), “a pervasive apprehension
that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is
absent.”17
The narratives that the conspiracy theories construct are all about
explaining why their believers are being deprived of social status, in part by
describing who is depriving them of it: that is, the narrative is ultimately
designed to scapegoat people, either specific individuals who represent a
larger target group or the target group itself. It does this by ultimately
depicting those targets as both demonic and a source of pollution, people fit
only for elimination.
“This is one of the paradoxical aspects of conspiracy theories—that they
give people a sense of control by nominating these dark forces that are
dominating their lives,” says Lewandowsky. “So there is this sort of ironic
blip in the entire psychology of it to begin with, which is that of regaining
control by blaming it on dark forces that are uncontrollable. It’s that sort of
paradoxical thing. Then there’s other literature showing that, for example,
having an enemy is chicken soup for the soul, makes people feel better to
have an enemy, bizarrely—under certain circumstances when they’re
feeling threatened.”18
At its roots, it’s about power: who has it and who doesn’t.
“It should be no surprise that feelings of power are relevant to beliefs in
conspiracy theories,” explain Wood and Douglas. “On a very basic level,
con spiracy theories are basically stories about power—the secret power of
a particu lar group, and the new power of the people who have come to see
through their deception. People who feel relatively powerless are more
likely to agree with conspiracy theories, and general conspiracy mentality
predicts prejudice against high-power but not low-power groups.”19
In the end, as Brotherton puts it, “the prototypical conspiracy theory is
an unanswered question; it assumes nothing is as it seems; it portrays the
con spirators as preternaturally competent; and as unusually evil; it is
founded on anomaly hunting; and it is ultimately irrefutable.”20
Meanwhile, the prototypical person drawn to them is, typically,
someone who feels keenly the kind of powerlessness common to modern
life and is angry about it. As Vox writer Sean Illing puts it: “I think of
conspiracy theorists as people who have rejected a world they don’t fit into,
and the theories them selves offer a way to make sense of it and invert the
cause of the problem. In other words, if I’m unhappy or alienated, it’s not
my fault; it’s these shadowy forces that are aligned against me. Plus, it gives
the conspiracy theorist a sense of power—they understand what’s really
going on in a way no one else does.”21

________

After a while, you start to notice that your friends and family and people
you know in real life have decided not to join you down inside the maze.
That’s their loss, right? They’re just normies. But soon it feels like your
only friends in the world are the friends you meet in the conspiracy
world.
At first, you’re eager to share your newfound insight with your real-
life friends. Then you stop when they start responding coldly and
sometimes harshly. You get into arguments with family members.
Old friends unfriend you, both in real life and on the Internet.
Relatives chastise you as stupid and gullible. Sometimes people you’ve
known for decades attack you on Facebook for buying into conspiracist
ideas. Social circles in which you used to run comfortably now feel
awkward, and invitations are fewer.
You’re confident that someday you’ll be vindicated, that all the so-
called friends and family who turned their backs on you will come
crawling apologetically when the truth comes down. That becomes a kind
 of comfort even as your relationships with those people shrivel to polite
hellos or perhaps even rancorous arguments.
It’s OK, because the people in the conspiracy’s community of true
believers are there for you. They’re your friends, and they reassure you
that those schmucks who claimed they loved you really just wanted to
control your mind and your life and you’re better off without them.
You don’t vote or participate in party politics anymore unless it has a
conspiracist appeal. Democracy is a joke, you realize. All those dark,
nefarious forces control too much, have rendered the entire political
establishment a fraud and a waste. The sheeple, the people who think
their votes and their efforts matter, spend their time on that stuff. You
know better.
You don’t watch the regular news anymore, certainly not the
corporate-owned entities at “fake news” joints like CNN and MSNBC; at
most, you’ll watch some Fox News, though even that has become a bit
too mainstream for your tastes. You’re consuming lots of information,
though, maybe more than you ever have—it’s just from sources like
Infowars, the Michael Savage show, various YouTube channels that
specialize in conspiracy theories, message boards at places like 4chan,
8chan, and Reddit, or even video game chat rooms on platforms that
come with the games.
It’s very reassuring, and it still feels empowering, because you realize
that you have become part of a much bigger community, a global
community, one that contains a wealth of knowledge and insights and
that layers more conspiracy theories to your own personal onion.
Then, even as the isolation in your real life sets in, you begin to have
doubts—not about the theory, but about some of your fellow
conspiracists. Always on the lookout for being taken advantage of, you
start feeling that they are giving you reasons not to trust them. It creeps
in.

________

One of the keys to Alex Jones’s success as a conspiracy peddler is that

he recognized early on that there was a community of like-minded
conspiracy theorists built around his broadcasts, people who not only
devoured gullibly his every utterance and hypothesis, but who would
contribute “facts” and propose narratives that further contributed to the
growing layers around his alternative universe of conspiracism. He did
everything he could to encourage that community—not merely by helping it
find platforms for contributing, but also by promoting their ideas on his
airtime and sometimes crediting them.
This army became adept not merely at consuming Infowars
programming avidly, buying Jones’s health supplements and vitamins and
tinctures—which, he assured them, would help overcome the effects of
chemicals deliberately released by government operatives into the
environment that have been proven to turn frogs gay and that will do the
same to humans—but also descending like flying monkeys en masse upon
anyone who dared criticize or attack Jones and his operation, harassing and
sometimes threatening them: initially, during the first decade of the 2000s,
through comments sections at websites and via emails and then, as social
media came into play, via Twitter and Facebook and Instagram.
The Infowars crowd may be the most dominant and prominent
exponents of conspiracism in America, but they are by no means the only
entity participating in the larger alternative universe they are helping to
create. Some conspiracy theorists, particularly those less prone to Jones’s
John Bircher–style politics, are almost entirely interested in health-related
conspiracies—particularly those revolving around claims that vaccinations
are secretly poisoning our children—whereas others are devoted to David
Icke-esque theories about UFOs and aliens secretly in control of
governments and the global economy. Conversely, many Infowars devotees
want nothing to do with such obvious “kooks.”
What they all share, however, is a general worldview that everything in
the world is run by conspiracies, that no public event or outcome is what it
appears to be, that the official explanation is never the truth, and that they
are all up against dark, nefarious, and extraordinarily powerful forces. And
around that, it’s remarkably easy to form a shared community of the like-
minded.
One study found, indeed, that a propensity for conspiracism was
connected closely with a desire for belongingness—but almost exclusively
among people with low self-esteem and low belief in their self-agency.22
Among devotees of the QAnon conspiracy theories, it’s a common
sentiment that much if not all of the draw is the camaraderie of fellow
conspiracists.
“There’s a sense of fellowship in the QAnon community,” explained
researcher Travis View in an interview with the Daily Beast. “They imagine
that they’re all members of a small group of people who know about a
coming glorious age in America. This fellowship isn’t the same as actual
familial relationships, but it’s a workable substitute when relationships with
family becomes frayed. So this creates a vicious cycle: they fall down the
rabbit hole of QAnon, which hurts their real life relationships, and causes
them to fall down the rabbit hole even further.”23
“When people get involved in a movement, collectively, what they’re
saying is they want to be connected to each other,” researcher Rachel
Bernstein explained in a Wired interview. “They want to have exclusive
access to secret information other people don’t have, information they
believe the powers that be are keeping from the masses, because it makes
them feel protected and empowered. They’re a step ahead of those in
society who remain willfully blind. This creates feeling similar to a drug—
it’s its own high.”24
The camaraderie feels like a kind of compensation for the rejection they
experience among longtime real-world acquaintances, and this helps drive
them further into the conspiracist community. The milieu can often turn out
to be shallow and brittle in nature, given the paranoid and often contentious
personalities attracted to this world. But in the short run, it keeps the
followers huddled together.
One woman who remained a QAnon believer told reporter Kelly Weill:
“I’ve done a complete 180. There are people in my family that don’t
understand as well. I’ve lost some friends, people I’ve known since high
school that I’m Facebook friends with, for an example. They just blocked
me, or decided I’m not their friend, or unfriended me. Who the heck came
up with that definition of friend anyway? That’s OK. It is what it is.”25
As Wood and Douglas explain:

[A] good deal of research points to a connection between

beliefs in conspiracy theories and perceived “outsiderdom”
or separation from mainstream society. This is especially
evident when looking at work on the psychological concept
of anomie. Anomie is a sense of social alienation or
 disconnection, a feeling that one’s own values and beliefs are
not represented in broader society. Feelings of anomie have
been shown to correlate significantly with beliefs in
conspiracy theories in diverse samples.26

“People in the QAnon community often talk about alienation from

family and friends,” View told the Daily Beast’s Kelly Weill. “Though they
typically talk about how Q frayed their relationships on private Facebook
groups. But they think these issues are temporary and primarily the fault of
others. They often comfort themselves by imagining that there will be a
moment of vindication sometime in the near future which will prove their
beliefs right. They imagine that after this happens, not only will their
relationships be restored, but people will turn to them as leaders who
understand what’s going on better than the rest of us.”27
These communities seem quaint and harmless to outsiders who see the
conspiracism as a kind of lark or a game. For the true believers, however,
the conspiracies are matters of life and death. And so they take on a
genuinely frightening aspect when they are turned into an army of avenging
angels, seeking out the enemies of their conspiracist community leaders—
the conniving “globalists,” their media minions, or anyone who wanders
into the path of their conspiracy theories, often accidentally and
unwillingly.
The parents of the twenty children who were slain, along with seven
adults, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on
December 14, 2012, by a conspiracy theory–loving teenager named Adam
Lanza, learned the power of Jones’s followers in the weeks and months
following the tragedy that devastated their lives. As horrific as that scenario
is for any parent, Jones and his acolytes managed to make their personal
nightmares unimaginably worse.
The day of the shooting, Jones floated the claim to his audience that the
whole event was a false flag set up by the government in order to justify a
federal crackdown on gun owners and particularly to target the
semiautomatic rifles of the type that Lanza had used. For the next two
years, Infowars continued to repeat this claim and build on it, amassing
“evidence” involving such dubious data as supposedly altered timestamps
for memorial websites to the victims.28
 In September 2014, Jones escalated the claims, saying “no one died” at
Sandy Hook and that the victims had all been “crisis actors.” This claim
was based on a typical Jones misinterpretation of a Connecticut state police
crime report that had designated the Newtown case in a special category.
That didn’t matter, of course: his army of followers promptly set to work,
finding usually blurry and always dubious portraits of the “child actors”
who had played the children slain at Sandy Hook, in their universe at least.
Infowars fans had already been causing problems. In May 2014, a man
named Andrew David Truelove stole a pair of memorial signs from two
different playgrounds, dedicated respectively to victims Grace McDonnell
and Chase Kowalski, then called both McDonnell’s and Kowalski’s parents,
telling them he had stolen the signs because he believed their children’s
deaths were a “hoax.” A few days later, Truelove called a writer for a liberal
website and laughingly boasted that he had stolen the signs. Investigators
were then able to quickly track him down, arrest him, and recover the signs
from his home. Convicted of theft, he was sentenced to a year in prison.29
It got worse. Truelove was hardly the only person calling up the Sandy
Hook parents and accusing them of participating in a false flag hoax, often
in a threatening manner. A former Florida Atlantic University professor
named James Tracy—who once taught a course on conspiracy theories—
began proclaiming that the shootings hadn’t occurred and started calling the
parents and harassing them. Another Florida man, a retired school
administrator named Wolfgang Halbig, became the “lead investigator” for
those who were intent on proving Sandy Hook a hoax.30
Halbig went on Jones’s Infowars show and proclaimed: “Children did
not die, teachers did not die on December 14, 2012.” Jones agreed wholly:
“I mean, it’s fake. . . . It’s fake. . . . You’ve got parents acting. . . . It’s just
the fakest thing since the $3 bill.”
The parents were inundated with phone calls and emails, and several
were forced to take security measures after threats. One of them was Lenny
Pozner, the father of six-year-old Noah Pozner, one of the victims. Pozner
did not take the harassment lying down and began organizing support
groups for the parents and their backers. In 2017, a Florida woman named
Lucy Richards was convicted of sending death threats to Pozner.
Eventually, in August 2018, seven families took Alex Jones, Infowars,
Wolfgang Halbig, and other conspiracy theorists to court for defamation
and harassment. During the proceedings, Jones testified that he actually
suffers from “a form of psychosis” caused by the media that makes him
doubt everything.31
“I, myself, have almost had like a form of psychosis back in the past
where I basically thought everything was staged, even though I’ve now
learned a lot of times things aren’t staged,” he said. “So I think as a pundit,
someone giving an opinion, that, you know, my opinions have been wrong,
but they were never wrong consciously to hurt people.”
He told the court that the source of his distrust of everything was the
“trauma of the media and the corporations lying so much . . . kind of like a
child whose parents lie to them over and over again.”32
The Infowars program, however, never blinked and never stopped
churning out the conspiracy theories.

________

After a while inside the conspiracy-theory community, you notice that

your fellow true believers are kind of manic—or at least very aggressive
and extremely assertive, especially when it comes to presenting or
defending or discussing new evidence.
What you notice, in fact, is that there’s competition inside the
community, particularly among the researchers who are constantly
stitching together the crumbs left by figures like Jones and, in the QAnon
world, by Q. The competition often becomes a race to see who can come
up with the most imaginative, the most in-your-face evidence or line of
argument.
The suspicion among members of the community runs high, feelings
often get hurt, and sniping goes on behind backs and to people’s faces,
and pretty soon things become complicated. In addition to being openly
paranoid, a lot of the participants are also bellicose, quick to anger,
massively egotistical with tender sensitivities, and, as time goes on, turn
out to be rather unpleasant people to hang around. Trust issues turn
formerly interesting forums into mutual sniping zones.
This is exacerbated by the unusual levels of financial hanky-panky
that seem to haunt so many operations inside the conspiracy-theory
universe. Scams abound (it turns out that Alex Jones’s so-called health
supplements operation essentially sells people items that they can find at
 a local store but at a huge markup), and everywhere you turn,
conspiracists are hitting you up for donations or purchases of their
products.
So, after a while, a lot of people find themselves shifting their
communities around, depending on the interpersonal dynamics that
evolve within the group—that, and the way people’s ideologies begin
evolving. Especially as they become increasingly exposed to the ideas
underlying and animating these conspiracy theories.
Like, say, “cultural Marxism.” There’s so much seemingly scholarly
and established evidence proving its existence, if you follow the trails on
the Internet. It’s yet another rabbit hole. Maybe it’s the ultimate one.

________

Sometimes, the feuding breaks out on the surface, among the leading
conspiracists: Noted “alt-lite” figures Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer, in
the summer of 2018, argued about who deserved credit for the conspiracy
theory they both promoted that Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter,
actually had secret ties to Islamic State. Loomer had in fact first promoted
this absurdly baseless claim that members of Congress had been briefed on
“ISIS ties” to the shooting.
“I just thought it was really shady how Jack calls himself my friend, but
then he won’t give me credit for my work,” Loomer said.33
However, Loomer herself picked up the story from a group called
Americans for Intelligence Reform, who claimed that an Australian man
who also stayed at the Mandalay Bay resort that evening was somehow
mysteriously connected to it all, and this man had not-altogether-clear
connections to Islamic State. In the modern age of evidence-free conspiracy
theories, this thin gruel was enough to fuel speculation for a week or so.
There have been other feuds, involving different dynamics: popular
pod-caster Joe Rogan and Alex Jones quarreled over the Sandy Hook
conspiracy theories, which Rogan found embarrassing. Roger Stone, the
onetime Donald Trump aide, and conspiracy-meister Jerome Corsi, who at
one time were bosom allies, broke into a vicious feud over their respective
roles in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election led
by Robert Mueller, in which they both were witnesses.34
 However, most of the real internecine warring within the world of
conspiracy theories takes place on the Internet among the various would-be
participants, researchers, and self-proclaimed “investigators” and “citizen
journalists.” It also occurs vividly among the conspiracy-fueled street-
fighting organizations like the Proud Boys and their various cousins.
One of the more prolific such groups, in terms of organizing street
protests that are designed to devolve into mass brawls and riots, is Patriot
Prayer, an outfit based in Vancouver, Washington, across the Columbia
River from Portland, Oregon, a city whose small but established population
of anarchists and antifascists is the target of the events. Although Patriot
Prayer founder Joey Gibson—himself a mixed-race Japanese American—
occasionally denounced white supremacists, his events regularly attracted
significant numbers of skinheads, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis, in
addition to the Patriot/militia bikers that formed the group’s original core.35
This created tensions within the group, many of whose members were
just fine with the presence of bigots, whereas others loudly denounced
them. Moreover, the Oregon chapter of the Proud Boys were among Patriot
Prayer’s sturdiest supporters and, in fact, formed its largest and most violent
street-fighting faction. Gibson’s right-hand man, a hulking Samoan named
Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, was certainly the most prominent of these Proud
Boys, as well as one of its most prolific brawlers, resulting in numerous
arrests and, eventually, a police investigation.
During the winter of 2018–2019, however, Patriot Prayer and the Proud
Boys started feuding, likely because the inclement Northwest weather
dampened enthusiasm for the street events. It devolved into a cesspit of
internal squabbling, accompanied by fever-pitched talk of committing
violence, some of it directed at one another.
This cluster of far-right activists, mostly based in the exurban and
suburban areas around Vancouver, had been ratcheting up the violence
inherent in their rhetoric for the previous year and a half, beginning with a
rally that drew a massive counterprotest shortly after an alt-right figure who
had attended Patriot Prayer events stabbed two men to death on a Portland
commuter train.36 That was followed by Gibson-organized events that
turned into massive brawls in Olympia and Seattle, Washington, and in San
Francisco and Berkeley, California.37
They also favored violent conspiracist rhetoric. Gibson regularly wore
an Infowars shirt to his events. Gibson and Tiny Toese both sported
“Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong” shirts sold by the Proud Boys, featuring
graphics showing people being pitched out of helicopters, at events the
summer of 2018. And both talked increasingly about the need to “step
things up” on the Facebook videos they liked to post. Even before a June
30, 2018, event that turned into a riot, Patriot Prayer had been vowing to
“cleanse” the streets of Portland.38
In the meantime, Toese went on a far-right podcast and explained that
he didn’t really have any problems with white supremacists. “I don’t give a
fuck if real racists come to the rallies, real alt-right,” he said. “We’ve been
trying to beat these people up for a long time; it ain’t gonna work. The only
thing that we can do to solve this whole fucking problem with Nazis and all
this shit is to have a civil conversation. And both sides understanding what
the other side wants.”39
It’s not clear what precipitated Toese’s falling-out with Patriot Prayer,
but it appeared to revolve around Haley Adams, a young blonde who had
been an increasingly visible presence at the organization’s events during the
previous year. Social media conversations suggested that Adams may have
been planning to “dox” some of the Proud Boy participants, which led
Toese, who had become increasingly loyal to the Proud Boys over the same
period, to denounce Adams. According to one account, Adams had actually
been denounced by Proud Boys “elders.”
In response, Adams’s most fervent defenders in Patriot Prayer took to
social media to make the split with Proud Boys clear and unequivocal.
“Haley Adams has my full approval to say whatever she wants to say,” a
man named Russell Schultz said in his video. “If the Proud Boys want to
attack her, that just tells me they are getting triggered and beat by a little
girl.”
Calling the Proud Boys “beta,” Schultz went on to promise he would
“kill” any Proud Boys who wanted to fight him over the dispute. “This shit
cannot happen,” he said. “You are a psycho; you need to get out of the
fucking movement. If you’re afraid of being doxxed, get out of the fucking
movement; you don’t need to be here; you’re a cancer. You have a problem
with me, want to come at me, I’m gonna fucking waste you. You have no
chance against me. I may even come looking for you one day.”40

________
 Now you no longer know who to trust. Your fellow “independent
thinkers” have proven to be untrustworthy. You feel more alone than
ever.
Turning back to your family and friends is out of the question.
They’ve already betrayed you. You can envision the gloating looks on
their faces if you try turning back to them. That’s not an option.
So you just go it alone. A lot of people quit their jobs and get work
where they don’t have to be in touch with normies because they can’t
stand trying to fake their utter contempt for these people. It’s not that
hard to do in the Internet age; you can work out of your home.
Other people move to remote, rural places where their contact with
other people is even further minimized. They don’t mind. They are going
to be laughing when the shit hits the fan and the end of the world comes
and everyone else is unprepared.
You won’t be, even if you have to go it completely alone. A lone
wolf, that’s what you are.

________

It probably is no surprise that a community built around paranoia and

suspicion and a highly fluid standard regarding what comprises factual
reality would eventually devolve into squabbling, threats, and even
violence. That certainly is what has happened, time and time again, within
the world of conspiracy theories. And yet the theories themselves continue
to exert a powerful gravitational pull that keeps most of the people who
tumble down the rabbit hole well within their orbit.
It’s almost inevitable that people who remain within the conspiracist
alternative universe for any extended period will eventually feel almost
completely isolated because of the kinds of personalities the universe
attracts: insecure, possessing low self-esteem about their place in the world,
yet bellicose, angry, aggressive, and often egotistical. People within this
universe form fast, intense friendships that often burn out quickly, leaving a
trail of hard feelings, small betrayals, and personal antagonisms that remain
buried in their psyches.
Eventually, the isolation becomes complete. The end point of the
conspiracist narrative is a person who is cut off from everyone in the world
—his family, his old friends, his coworkers, even his next-door neighbors—
because they all are either suspected active members of the conspiracy or
are hapless, gullible pawns. He has no political power because he does not
vote and does not participate in any part of the process. He even is cut off
from the rest of the culture because he no longer consumes any media
except material that helps support the conspiracy narrative.
“All this conspiracism erodes trust not just in public institutions but in
our fellow citizens,” observes Nancy Rosenblum. “We’re obliterating trust
in each other and in the political competition, and that’s a direct attack on
the foundations of democracy. Liberal democracy requires a minimum
amount of mutual trust among citizens, and conspiracism destroys it.”41
It is at these endpoints—when the conspiracist is utterly convinced he is
alone in the world—that the real danger of violence becomes manifest,
particularly if the true believer becomes convinced, for one reason or
another, that he must act in order to save mankind or his family or his race
or whomever he perceives as being threatened.
“The relationship between conspiracy theories and violent action is
complicated, and researchers are only beginning to examine its
complexity,” writes University of Miami political scientist Joseph Uscinski.
“Perhaps those who commit violence would do so regardless of their
conspiracy beliefs. Maybe conspiracy theories are only one of many
motivations for violence. Researchers don’t yet know.
“But the latest findings suggest that those most likely to believe in
conspiracy theories are also (1) more likely to support violence against the
government, (2) more likely to oppose gun control measures, and (3) more
likely to agree that it’s acceptable to engage in conspiracies themselves to
achieve goals. It’s not hard to see how the approval of violence, lax gun
laws, and secret plotting could form a toxic combination driving some to
fight fire with fire.”42
Not all conspiracy theorists, of course, wind up engaging in a mass
shooting. The vast majority, in fact, simply remain within that realm and
often wind up amassing a huge alternative universe comprised of entire
libraries of arcane “facts,” ruminations, conjectures, and naked lies.
However, their presence as a factor in nearly every single major mass
shooting and domestic terrorist event of the past thirty years makes it
irrevocably clear that they play a critical role in the unhinging of people
who go down that path: the dehumanization of other people, the sense of
surreality that everyday life acquires, and, most of all, the ongoing and
ultimately complete disconnectedness of the conspiracist from everyday life
and ordinary human contact—all these combine for a lethal combination
that destroys the lives of the people it infects and then destroys the lives of
the thousands of innocents whose misfortune places them within their
sphere. They are quite literally killing us all.
Chapter 7

CHAOS BY DESIGN

What’s on the menu? When it comes to everyone’s social media diet, there’s
one constant you can count on: misinformation.
It’s built into the system. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci explained it
succinctly in her TED talk:1

So in 2016, I attended rallies of then-candidate Donald

Trump to study as a scholar the movement supporting him. I
study social movements, so I was studying it, too. And then I
wanted to write something about one of his rallies, so I
watched it a few times on YouTube. YouTube started
recommending to me and autoplaying to me white
supremacist videos in increasing order of extremism. If I
watched one, it served up one even more extreme and
autoplayed that one, too. If you watch Hillary Clinton or
Bernie Sanders content, YouTube recommends and
autoplays conspiracy left, and it goes downhill from there.
Well, you might be thinking, this is politics, but it’s not.
This isn’t about politics. This is just the algorithm figuring
out human behavior. I once watched a video about
 vegetarianism on YouTube and YouTube recommended and
autoplayed a video about being vegan. It’s like you’re never
hardcore enough for YouTube.
So what’s going on? Now, YouTube’s algorithm is
proprietary, but here’s what I think is going on. The
algorithm has figured out that if you can entice people into
thinking that you can show them something more hardcore,
they’re more likely to stay on the site watching video after
video going down that rabbit hole while Google serves them
ads. Now, with nobody minding the ethics of the store, these
sites can profile people who are Jew haters, who think that
Jews are parasites and who have such explicit anti-Semitic
content, and let you target them with ads.
They can also mobilize algorithms to find for you look-
alike audiences, people who do not have such explicit anti-
Semitic content on their profile but who the algorithm
detects may be susceptible to such messages, and lets you
target them with ads, too. Now, this may sound like an
implausible example, but this is real. ProPublica investigated
this and found that you can indeed do this on Facebook, and
Facebook helpfully offered up suggestions on how to
broaden that audience. BuzzFeed tried it for Google, and
very quickly they found, yep, you can do it on Google, too.
And it wasn’t even expensive. The ProPublica reporter spent
about $30 to target this category.2

As Internet companies like YouTube and Facebook have struggled with the
deluge of far-right extremism, racial bigotry, and conspiracy theories that
have filled their platforms, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s one
very simple and yet insurmountable reason they haven’t been able to get it
under control: their revenue streams are built around attracting such
content.3
YouTube executives, as a Bloomberg News piece exposed in early
2019, have remained lackadaisical about the problem over the years that it
has accumulated. “Scores of people inside YouTube and Google, its owner,
raised concerns about the mass of false, incendiary and toxic content that
the world’s largest video site surfaced and spread,” Peter Bergen reported.
“Each time they got the same basic response: Don’t rock the boat.”4
Getting these platforms to clamp down on speech that helps fuel racial
violence—notably including conspiracy-theorist content that scapegoats
targeted minorities—is made more difficult both by the traffic-boosting
incentives in place to permit it to continue, as well as by the ease with
which targeted offenders can escape their wrath and continue to post
content.
The conspiratorial mindset is threaded throughout the social fabric of
YouTube. It’s part of the warp and weft of its production economy.
“YouTube offers infinite opportunities to create a closed ecosystem, an
opaque algorithm, and the chance for a very small number of people to
make a very large amount of money,” observes Alexis Madrigal, deputy
editor of the Atlantic. “While these conditions of production—which
incentivize content creation at a very low cost to YouTube—exist on other
modern social platforms, YouTube’s particular constellation of them is
special. It’s why conspiracy videos get purchase on the site, and why they
will be very hard to uproot.”5
No one is more emblematic of that problem than conspiracy-meister
Alex Jones of Infowars, who was officially banned from YouTube and
Facebook in August 2018. Even though Jones had a long and horrific track
record with his videos, the lawsuit filed by the parents of Sandy Hook
victims plagued by Infowars followers made clear the potential liability that
every platform that hosted his work faced.6
Jones has not disappeared easily, however. His Infowars content has
been reposted by a number of mirror sites that eventually have been
removed—one as recently as just after the attacks in Christchurch. In spite
of this, Media Matters notes: “Channels that violate YouTube’s rules by
exclusively sharing Infowars content are easily found on YouTube, but the
video platform doesn’t appear to be devoting many resources to enforcing
its own rules.”7
Indeed, YouTube very nearly installed a remuneration system for its
video creators in 2017 that would have made Jones the site’s highest-paid
contributor and only changed course after its platform was linked to various
acts of violence.
The top priority at YouTube is “engagement”: getting people to come to
the site and remain there, accumulated in data as views, time spent viewing,
and interactions. Moderating extremist content is often devalued if it
interferes with the company’s main goals. The key for gauging engagement
is a metric the algorithm designers call “watch time”—that is, the amount of
time you spend consuming media on the site.
Becca Lewis, a researcher with the technology research nonprofit Data
& Society, warns that this fixation on watch time can be either banal or
dangerous. “In terms of YouTube’s business model and attempts to keep
users engaged on their content, it makes sense what we’re seeing the
algorithms do,” Lewis said. “That algorithmic behavior is great if you’re
looking for makeup artists and you watch one person’s content and want a
bunch of other people’s advice on how to do your eye shadow. But it
becomes a lot more problematic when you’re talking about political and
extremist content.”8
The company announced early in 2019 that it intended to crack down on
the conspiracism. However, part of its problem is that YouTube in fact
created a huge market for these crackpot and often harmful theories by
unleashing an unprecedented boom in conspiracism. That same market is
where it now makes its living.
The formula for success that emerged over time at YouTube is simple:
“Outrage equals attention.” Brittan Heller, a fellow at Harvard University’s
Carr Center, observed that it’s also ripe for exploitation by political
extremists and hucksters. “They don’t know how the algorithm works,” she
said. “But they do know that the more outrageous the content is, the more
views.”9
And the more views, the more money these platforms—not just
YouTube, but Google and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram—roll in.
Hate and division become the fuel for profit in this system.
Information scientist Safiya Umoja Noble observes that “the neoliberal
political and economic environment has profited tremendously from
misinformation and mischaracterization of communities, with a range of
consequences for the most disenfranchised and marginalized among us.”
She has particularly zeroed in on the way that search engines have bolstered
white nationalist and similarly extremist ideas through their “algorithms of
oppression”: “Search results, in the context of commercial advertising
companies, lay the groundwork . . . for implicit bias: bias that is buttressed
by advertising profits.”10
 Algorithms not only are designed to reinforce racial stereotypes and
narratives, they actually help encourage people to be radicalized by
extremist political ideologies—particularly white nationalism.

________

It may be the most notorious Google search in history: “black on white

crime.” That was the search that sent Dylann Roof down the path that led
him to murder nine black parishioners inside a Charleston, South Carolina,
church one evening in June 2015.
He described this path in a post on the white supremacist website he had
created.

The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin

case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I
decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right
away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It
was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more
importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on
White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same
since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of
Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these
brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this
moment I realized that something was very wrong. How
could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while
hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?
From this point I researched deeper and found out what
was happening in Europe. I saw that the same things were
happening in England and France, and in all the other
Western European countries. Again I found myself in
disbelief. As an American we are taught to accept living in
the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as
much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants.
But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many
ways the situation is even worse there. From here I found out
about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race,
and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.11
Roof actually has provided a kind of map of radicalization online. As
information scientist Michael Caulfield explains, this whole process is
actually produced by a kind of self-contained data spiral that’s based to a
large extent on “curation”—that is, the way we collect web materials into
our own spaces and annotate them.12 That curation creates a data feedback
for the algorithm that then directly affects what you see. Curations, he
warns, can warp reality because of the resulting feedback loop: they “don’t
protect us from opposing views, but often bring us to more radical views.”
Caulfield observes that “black on white crime” is a data void—that is,
it’s not a term used by social scientists or reputable news organizations,
“which is why the white nationalist site Council of Conservative Citizens
came up in those results. That site has since gone away, but what it was was
a running catalog of cases where black men had murdered (usually) white
women. In other words, it’s yet another curation, even more radical and
toxic than the one that got you there. And then the process begins again.”
Noble explains that the framing a person brings to his or her Internet
experience shapes what kinds of results they see on a search engine, or a
video recommendation, or a social media news feed. “In the case of Dylann
Roof’s alleged Google searches,” she writes, “his very framing of the
problems of race relations in the U.S. through an inquiry such as ‘black on
white crime’ reveals how search results belie any ability to intercede in the
framing of a question itself. In this case, answers from conservative
organizations and cloaked websites that present news from a right-wing,
anti-Black, and anti-Jewish perspective are nothing more than propaganda
to foment racial hatred.”13
The key to this process of radicalization is its incremental nature: people
undergoing it don’t recognize what is happening to them, since each step
feels normal initially. This is in fact precisely by design by the
organizations and ideologues who are trying to recruit people into their
conspiracy theories, which are ultimately about belief systems and political
movements.
A onetime “red-pilled” conspiracy theorist named Matt described how
he became trapped in a curated spiral like this for Kelly Weill of the Daily
Beast. It began when he innocently watched a video of Bill Maher and Ben
Affleck discussing Islam, and at its completion, the algorithm
recommended several much more extreme videos attacking Islam, including
some produced by Infowars conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson. One
video led to the next and the next.14
“Delve into [Watson’s] channel and start finding his anti-immigration
stuff which often in turn leads people to become more sympathetic to ethno-
nationalist politics,” Matt said. “This sort of indirectly sent me down a path
to moving way more to the right politically as it led me to discover other
people with similar far-right views.”
Now twenty, Matt has since exited the ideology and built an anonymous
Internet presence where he argues with his ex-brethren on the right.
“I think YouTube certainly played a role in my shift to the right because
through the recommendations I got,” he said, “it led me to discover other
content that was very much right of center, and this only got progressively
worse over time, leading me to discover more sinister content.”
“The thing to remember about this algorithmic–human grooming hybrid
is that the gradualness of it—the step-by-step nature of it—is a feature for
the groomers, not a bug,” says Caulfield. “I imagine if the first page Roof
had encountered on the CCC page had sported a Nazi flag and a big banner
saying ‘Kill All Jews,’ he’d have hit the back button, and maybe the world
might be different. (Maybe.) But the curation/search spiral brings you to
that point step by step. In the center of the spiral you probably still have
enough good sense to not read stuff by Nazis, at least knowingly. By the
time you get to the edges, not so much.”15
Peter Neumann, of the United Kingdom’s Centre for the Study of
Radicalisation, identifies six steps on the ladder of extremist belief. “The
first two of these processes deal with the consequences of being exposed to
extremist content,” he writes. “No single item of extremist propaganda is
guaranteed to transform people into terrorists. Rather, in most cases, online
radicalization results from individuals being immersed in extremist content
for extended periods of time, the amplified effects of graphic images and
video, and the resulting emotional desensitization.”16
Beheading videos, photos of corpses, suicides, and mass murders, all
these things are part of these first two steps in the immersion process.
Neumann calls this mortality salience—material intended to create an
overpowering sense of one’s own vulnerability to death, as well as to
heighten the viewer’s moral outrage.
The next two steps are also key to the process—namely, immersion in
extremist forums, where deviant and extremist views are normalized, and
online disinhibition, wherein people lose their normal inhibitions about
violence because of their relative anonymity online. “Some of the
participants get so worked up that they declare themselves ready to be
terrorists,” notes psychologist Marc Sageman. “Since this process takes
place at home, often in the parental home, it facilitates the emergence of
homegrown radicalization, worldwide.”17
The final stages occur when online role-playing occurs—the kind in
which new recruits more or less practice their ideology in gaming
situations, often in the context of modern video games. The participants
project themselves into their gaming avatars, giving themselves traits that
they usually do not possess in real life. After a while, this divide becomes
noticeable and drives further radicalization: “[A]fter recognizing the gap
between their avatar’s mobilization and their own physical mobilization,
many online participants begin taking steps to reconcile the gap,” observe
researchers Jaret Brachmann and Alex Levine.18 This is when they take the
last step: using the Internet to connect directly to terrorist infrastructures
that then begin to mobilize them.
Caulfield believes one of the keys to preventing this kind of
radicalization lies in establishing “digital literacy” programs wherein young
people new to the Internet can learn how to confront, cope with, and
overcome the challenges they will be forced to navigate there. And it all
begins with the curation process, how we accumulate the materials for our
personal spaces.
“So, the idea here is that you might start in a relatively benign space
with some kind of ideological meaning, and then someone uses this term
‘black on white crime,’” Caulfield says. “It’s probably a stretch to call the
Google search results a curation, but you can think of it along the same
lines. You put in a term, and Google is going to show you the most relevant,
not necessarily the best, but the most relevant results for that term. And now
you have a set of things that are in front of you. Now, on each of those
pages, because you picked ‘black on white crime,’ if you click into that
page that has ‘black on white crime,’ there are going to be other phrases on
there.”19
Even people with normal levels of skepticism can find themselves
drawn inside. “So you go, and you do the Google search, and you’re like,
‘You know what? I can’t trust this page. I’m going to be a good info-
literacy person, and what I’m going to do is, I’m going to just check that
these crimes really happened.’ OK, so what do you do? You pull these
crimes and what you find is that these crimes did happen, and the pages
they’re going to are more white supremacists talking about how these are
actually black on white hate crimes. And now they’re mentioning more
things, and they’re mentioning more terms, and they’re mentioning changes
in law that now make it easier for black people to kill white people.
“So you’re like ‘Oh, well, I’ve got to Google this change in the law.’
But who’s talking about this thing that’s broadly made up, or it’s a heavy
misinterpretation of something? Well, again it’s white. . . . So you keep
going deeper and deeper, and every time you’re pulling out something to
investigate on that page, it’s pulling you into another site, and that other site
of course is covering a bunch of other events and terms and so forth. And
you end up going deeper and deeper into it.”20
Caulfield argues that educators need to help their students develop
better informational literacy, including learning how to recognize when they
are being recruited into a radical belief system or cult or are being
manipulated for either financial or political motivations.
“My contention is that the students are practicing info-literacy as
they’ve learned it,” he says. “And as a matter of fact, this approach to
researching online is what they have learned from a fairly early age in terms
of how to approach sources and information on the web.
“I think a lot of academics and teachers would say, ‘but that’s not what
we’re teaching,’” he adds. “Let’s just put that whole argument aside
because it doesn’t matter. Whatever we’re teaching, these are the lessons
they take away from it. So they are practicing info-literacy as learned, and
through either chance or through engineering or through fate, whatever it is,
these techniques plug really well into radicalization.”21

________

Sometimes the people who fall down the rabbit holes and are recruited into
communities organized around conspiracy theories would have ended up in
a similar situation regardless. But people are also being actively recruited
for a combination of political, ideological, and financial/economic
motivations. And they are being actively deceived.
“We are all targets of disinformation, meant to erode our trust in
democracy and divide us,” warns University of Washington information
scientist Kate Starbird.22
She came to this stark conclusion while conducting a study at the
University of Washington involving the evolution of the discussion about
the Black Lives Matter movement on social media—and found herself
walking into the unexpected realization, supported both by data and a raft of
real-world evidence, that the whole discussion was being manipulated, and
not for the better. The more the team examined the evidence, the clearer it
became that this manipulation was intended to fuel internal social strife
among the American public.23
The study quickly morphed into a scientific examination of
disinformation—that is, information that’s intended to confuse and distort,
whether accurate or not—which exists on all sides of the political
spectrum.24 One of their key studies focused on Twitter to see how bad
information immediately follows major crisis-type events such as mass
shootings and how those rumors “muddy the waters” around the event, even
for people who were physically present, and in particular how such rumors
can permanently alter the public’s perception of the event itself and its
causes.
Consider exhibit A: the nearly instantaneous claims by Alex Jones and
other conspiracy theorists that the Las Vegas mass shooting of October 1,
2017, was a false flag event and the ensuing swirl of confusion around it,
which eventually permanently obscured the public’s understanding that the
man who perpetrated it was unhinged and at least partially motivated by far-
right conspiracy theories about guns. Police investigators avoided the
evidence that this had been the case as well.
The chief reason we perceive stories, whether real or not, as “true”
depends in large part on our unconscious cognitive biases, Starbird says—
that is, when our preexisting beliefs are confirmed along the way. We’ve
seen how these biases can be targeted by technology companies. Well-
equipped political organizations can manipulate disinformation in much the
same way.
“If it makes you feel outraged against the other side, probably someone
is manipulating you,” she warns.25
The main wellspring of the disinformation Starbird dealt with in her
study was Russia and its “troll farms” that introduced industrial-strength
data pollution into the American discourse via social media during the 2016
election campaign and afterward. However, she says that the disinformation
can be, and often is, run by anyone sophisticated enough to understand its
essential principles. These include white nationalists, a number of
conspiracy-oriented campaigns involving vaccines and other health-related
conspiracies, and in recent years, QAnon.
The strategy, she says, is not just consistent, but frighteningly
sophisticated and nuanced. “One of these goals is to ‘sow division,’ to put
pressure on the fault lines in our society,” she explained in her findings. “A
divided society that turns against itself, that cannot come together and find
common ground, is one that is easily manipulated. . . . Russian agents did
not create political division in the United States, but they were working to
encourage it.”26
These outside organizational entities make full use of a preexisting
media ecosystem featuring “news” outlets that claim to be “fair” and
“independent,” but which are in fact only propaganda organizations, nearly
all of them right-wing. As Starbird explained in one of her studies:

This alternative media ecosystem has challenged the

traditional authority of journalists, both directly and
indirectly. . . . Its development has been accompanied by a
decreased reliance on and an increased distrust of
mainstream media, with the latter partially motivated by a
perception of widespread ethical violations and corruption
within mainstream media. . . . Indeed, many view these
alternative news sites as more authentic and truthful than
mainstream media, and these effects are compounding—as
research has found that exposure to online media correlates
with distrust of mainstream media.27

False information renders democratic discourse, which relies on factual

accuracy, impossible, and as Starbird notes, “with the loss of commonly-
held standards regarding information mediation and the absence of easily
decipherable credibility cues, this ecosystem has become vulnerable to the
spread of misinformation and propaganda.”28
Because it’s actually a fairly closed, self-contained, and narrow
ecosystem, it becomes a real echo chamber, with stories being repeated
among the various “independent” news sites, even if they seem not to show
up on the major networks (Fox being the most common exception). After a
while, the repetition acts as a kind of confirmation for the stories—if people
keep seeing different versions of the same headlines, they’ll start thinking
the information has been confirmed by a “variety” of sources.
“The tactics of disinformation can be used by anyone,” Starbird says.
“The Internet seems to facilitate access towards targets of different kinds,
and we are definitely seeing disinformation from multiple sets of actors,
including from the U.S., including foreign actors and domestic actors as
well. There’s a certain flavor of Russian disinformation that is perhaps
different from some others, but the tactics are known and they are easily
learned and portable.”29
Unwinding the relationship between authoritarian governments like
Russia—which has been promoting far-right political movements around
the world, particularly in Europe—and white nationalists trying to “red-
pill” vulnerable young people is complicated. “There are some movements,
particularly these far-right movements, whose disinformation aligns neatly
with Russian disinformation as well,” Starbird observes.
“It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. The current manifestation of the far
right or alt-right or whatever we want to call it, the information systems and
some of the mechanisms for information flow all seem to have Russian
disinformation integrated into them. It’s hard to know what’s cause and
what’s effect, but they seem to be intertwined. In a similar way, we can see
far left ecosystems around things like Syria and Venezuela are integrated
with Russian disinformation as well. . . . We don’t know how causal that is
versus opportunistic.”30

________

Among the most radical—and simultaneously, the most active—movements

organizing and recruiting online, particularly on social media, are the white
nationalists and misogynists who comprise the alt-right. Their homes are
web-sites like the overtly neo-Nazi Daily Stormer site and a handful of
other similar places, whence they spread out to a multitude of other forums
to find potentially vulnerable recruits, most of them young.
The radical right itself has little compunction about identifying its target
demographic for red-pilling. Andrew Anglin, publisher and founder of the
Stormer, wrote: “My site is mainly designed to target children.”31 At the
annual white nationalist American Renaissance conference in Tennessee in
April 2018, longtime supremacists bragged about their demographic
support: “American Renaissance attendees are now younger and more
evenly divided among the sexes than in the past,” one speaker noted before
gushing over the white nationalist college campus group Identity Evropa.32
When authorities, both in the United States and abroad, have talked
about online radicalization in the recent past, most of us have tended to
think of it in terms of radical Islamists from groups such as Islamic State,
who have been known to leverage the technology to their advantage,
particularly social media. A study by terrorism expert J. M. Berger
published in 2016 found that white nationalists were far outstripping their
Islamist counterparts, however: “On Twitter, ISIS’s preferred social
platform, American white nationalist movements have seen their followers
grow by more than 600 percent since 2012. Today, they outperform ISIS in
nearly every social metric, from follower counts to tweets per day.”33
“Online radicalization seems to be speeding up, with young men,
particularly white men, diving into extremist ideologies quicker and
quicker,” Berger said, adding that “the result seems to be more violence, as
these examples indicate. It is a serious problem and we don’t seem to have
any real solutions for it. These cases also show that an era of violence
brought on by the internet is indeed upon us, with no end in sight.”
The radicalization process itself often begins with seemingly benign
activity, such as spending hours in chat rooms or playing computer games,
and these activities provide a kind of cover for the process as it accelerates.
Eventually, two things happen: The fresh recruits become eager to take their
ideology to the streets, to make it manifest in real life and not merely
online. At the same time, the ideology itself often becomes much more
radical, often swiftly, ending in an embrace of explicit fascism and white
supremacy.
That is how Patriot Front came into being: best known for its members
plastering overtly racist and xenophobic fliers around campuses and various
locales around the nation, it nonetheless recruits and organizes almost
entirely online.34
The origins of Patriot Front lie in neo-Nazi organizing that began in
2015 at the message board IronMarch.org, itself an outgrowth of the
community of dedicated fascists who commented at online forums such as
4chan and Storm-front and allegedly founded by Russian nationalist
Alexander Slavros. IronMarch in turn spun off the activist group
Atomwaffen (German for “atomic bomb”) Division, whose members
engaged in various far-right actions in both 2018 and 2019.35 Atomwaffen
activists favored plastering flyers advertising their organization, and their
reach included the University of Washington campus in Seattle.36
Although Atomwaffen Division was explicit in its embrace of German-
style Nazism, other fascists at IronMarch began discussing ways to broaden
their reach in order to compete with alt-right and identitarian groups such as
Identity Evropa for young recruits. Out of these discussions they created a
new group in 2015, first named Reaction America, then renamed in 2016 as
American Vanguard. When one of that group’s leaders was exposed for
offering up information to an antifascist group and IronMarch users and
administrators began “doxxing” American Vanguard members, the group
broke away from IronMarch. In early 2017, the organization once again
rebranded as Vanguard America. After an Atomwaffen Division member in
Florida shot and killed two other members in May 2017, telling authorities
the group was planning to blow up a nuclear plant, a number of
Atomwaffen participants joined ranks with Vanguard America.37
The leader of Vanguard America (VA), a Marine Corps veteran from
New Mexico named Dillon Irizarry (but better known by his nom de plume
Dillon Hopper), began organizing rallies at which members openly carried
firearms. On its website, VA claimed that America was built on the
foundation of white Europeans and demanded the nation recapture the glory
of the Aryan nation, free of the influence of the international Jews.38
Vanguard America had a significant presence in Charlottesville,
Virginia, for the August 11–12, 2017, “Unite the Right” rally, as several of
its members joined in the Friday-night torch-bearing march onto the
University of Virginia campus. The next day, a phalanx of VA marchers
chanting “Blood and soil!” marched toward the protest at a city park and
then were recorded acting as a shield wall meant to protect the park and its
monument to Robert E. Lee, whose feared imminent removal by city fathers
was, symbolically at least, the nominal focus of the protest.
Among those VA marchers was James Alex Fields, the twenty-year-old
Ohio man who, later that afternoon, drove his Dodge Challenger into a
crowd of counterprotesters and maimed twenty people, killing one, thirty-
two-year-old Heather Heyer. VA later issued a statement claiming that
Fields was not actually a member of the organization.39
 Another marcher that Saturday in Charlottesville—indeed,
photographed only two marchers away from Fields—was Thomas
Rousseau, who not only was a VA member but had taken a prominent
leadership role in the group online. Based in Texas, Rousseau noted in chats
that VA’s statement “never said that [Fields] did anything wrong.” Soon he
and other participants were recommending yet another name change.40
On August 30, Rousseau announced, in a major split with
Irizarry/Hopper, that “we are rebranding and reorganizing as a new entity,”
henceforth to be known as “Patriots Front” (the “s” was dropped in short
order). “The new name was carefully chosen, as it serves several purposes.
It can help inspire sympathy among those more inclined to fence-sitting,
and can easily be used to justify our worldview.”
The mention of “fence sitting” was a reference to the ongoing
discussion within the online neo-Nazi community about engaging and
recruiting young men sympathetic to their underlying cause but not yet fully
radicalized. There had been similar discussions about drawing in “patriots”
from the far-right militia movement, who have traditionally insisted on
drawing a line on participating in outright white supremacist activity.
Rousseau also made it clear that the plan was to translate online
discussion into real-world actions, concrete activism: “You will be expected
to work, and work hard to meet the bar rising,” he wrote. “Inactivity will
get you expelled, unwillingness to work and contribute in any capacity will
as well.”41
As Patriot Front’s organizing has played out in real life, that “work” has
primarily comprised making their presence felt at rallies and protests,
spreading the word with freeway banners, and plastering flyers in public
locations, where they are often summarily removed.
That ethos is how Patriot Front organizing generally has played out on
the ground. The group first made its presence felt in Houston in September
2017, when about a dozen members appeared outside a book fair and
demanded a fight with antifascist organizers who reportedly were inside
giving a talk. (Rousseau later led a similar protest outside an Austin
bookstore.)
Other members around the country began taking their activism public
by erecting banners promoting the Patriot Front website on freeway
overpasses, frequently for just short periods and removed before authorities
arrived to remove them. In Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, a group of
masked neo-Nazis briefly unfurled a swastika-laden banner advertising
IronMarch.org; two months later, in suburban Bellevue, a similar group put
up a banner advertising bloodandsoil.org on an Interstate 90 overpass,
where it was shortly removed by Department of Transportation workers. In
October, someone erected a Patriot Front “Resurrection through
Insurrection” banner on a freeway near Los Angeles, California. And in
November, Patriot Front activists put up a banner in San Antonio, Texas, on
the Texas–San Antonio campus.
The most widespread manifestation of Patriot Front’s organizing efforts,
however, has been the appearance of its flyers in public spaces around the
country. Their stark black-and-white posters—featuring a variety of
slogans, including “We Have a Right to Exist,” “Fascism: The Next Step for
America,” “Will Your Speech Be Hate Speech?” as well as screeds urging
“patriots” to “reconquer your birthright,” while others exhort “all white
Americans” to “report any and all illegal aliens”—have been either taped or
glued to lampposts, telephone poles, windows, doors, bulletin boards, and
anywhere else they can be seen by the public. They have especially targeted
college campuses.
However, Patriot Front is notable for its utterly undisguised and
unrepentant fascism. It’s also utterly lacking in the often juvenile
transgressive humor and use of pop culture and irony that are core to much
of the appeal of the alt-right online. Instead, its dead-serious advocacy of
white supremacist ideology is intended to appeal to a more militant
mindset, an important byproduct of its origins in the IronMarch.org
community. As the manifesto on its website explains in depth:

An African may have lived, worked, and even been classed

as a citizen in America for centuries, yet he is not American.
He is, as he likely prefers to be labelled, an African in
America. The same rule applies to others who are not of the
founding stock of our people, or do not share the common
unconscious that permeates throughout our greater
civilization, and the European diaspora. The American
identity was something uniquely forged in the struggle that
our ancestors waged to survive in this new continent.
America is truly unique in this pan-European identity which
forms the roots of our nationhood. To be an American is to
 realize this identity and take up the national struggle upon
one’s shoulders. Not simply by birth is one granted this title,
but by the degree to which he works and fulfills the potential
of his birth. No man is complete simply to live, but to do
more than that, to strive to create a path onward for his
people, and to connect with the heritage he is undeniably a
part of. That is what completes a man. Only then is he truly
deserving of the title and a place among his people.

To date, Patriot Front appears mainly to be comprised of small clusters of

dedicated neo-Nazis intent on spreading their fascist gospel to other right-
wing extremists, especially “fence-sitting” alt-righters potentially attracted
to violent street action. It is noteworthy mainly because of the ease and
rapidity with which it has spread to nearly every corner of the country, and
the open appeals to young white males, who are the focus of their
recruitment.42
Atomwaffen Division, however, became another matter altogether. It
came to national prominence after the arrests in summer of 2017, when one
of its members murdered his two roommates, who also belonged to the
overtly neo-Nazis training organization, and a third, who wasn’t present
when the killings occurred, was shortly caught with a carful of homemade
explosives, arrested, and convicted. A few months later, another
Atomwaffen member murdered a gay Jewish student from California.
A ProPublica exposé of Atomwaffen Division published in February
2018 revealed that its members had been undergoing arms training in the
woods, while plotting to target key members of the public for assassination
and ultimately a “race war.” They also discussed domestic terrorism,
including poisoning city water supplies, bombing natural gas lines, and
destroying electric infrastructure.
“We’re only going to inspire more ‘copycat crimes’ in the name of
AWD. All we have to do is spread our image and our propaganda,” one of
its leaders exhorted his cohorts.43

________

Getting red-pilled actually means a lot of different things to the people who
claim it, though it generally refers to embracing any of a number of
conspiracy theories and absorbing the conspiracist worldview—which can
often morph into something even more radical very quickly.
A large collection of group chats among explicitly fascist ideologues
and organizers was analyzed by the open-source journalism site Bellingcat,
which examined the process by which recruits became increasingly
radicalized and absorbed into the belief system.44
It found that most agree that the key is acknowledgment of the Jewish
question, or JQ; that is, whether or not Jewish people are at the center of a
vast global conspiracy, the end goal of which is usually “white genocide.”
The participants in the chats described red-pilling as a gradual process, but
the end point seemed to be almost uniformly alt-right white nationalism.
“Individual people can be red-pilled on certain issues and not others,”
the report noted. “Stefan Molyneux, a popular author and far-right YouTube
personality, is seen as being red-pilled on race and ‘the future of the west’
even though he is not considered as a fascist. Prominent YouTuber
PewDiePie is also often considered red-pilled. It is accepted that media
personalities need to hide their outright fascist beliefs, or ‘power level,’ in
order to have a chance at redpilling the general population.”45
Recruitment techniques, in fact, tend to dominate the discussions, and
disagreements often erupt over which are the most effective, though
everyone concurred that people who harbor an animus toward “social
justice warriors” (known more often by their acronym, SJWs) and “political
correctness” are prime targets. They also agree that Donald Trump is seen
as the source of redpilling for many Americans.
Males comprised the vast majority of these fascist activists—some, in
fact, doubted that women can be red-pilled at all. When women did appear
on the scene, they made their marks by being even more extreme than the
typical conspiracy theorist.
Most of them, though not all, were being radicalized online: the report
found thirty-nine of the seventy-five fascists whose chats it studied credit
the Internet as their red-pilling source, with YouTube the website most
frequently referenced. However, the report notes that “when indoctrination
begins offline new converts inevitably go online to deepen their beliefs.”46
A user named barD described his red-pilling process:

Get redpilled on Feminism after reading some crazy SJW

posts about MLP [My Little Pony] being racist and sexist
 and anti-lesbian, get redpilled on islam after getting intruiged
by some islamisists taking in a youtube comments section.
Get redpilled on GG [Gamergate] from sargon.47

The spiral that barD described continued ratcheting up, ranging from
comment-section disputes to consuming videos from far-right YouTube
personalities to participating in the comments at “the_donald” subreddit and
4chan’s infamous white nationalist–dominated /pol/ board, eventually
concluding at fascist Discord servers.
Radicalized recruits are fond of claiming that they actually never used
to be racist at all but that an argument with an “SJW” online made them so
angry they turned to white nationalist ideology. They insist that racist
remarks they make are meant only “ironically,” rather like the OK sign.
Bellingcat found a user named FucknOathMate who, when asked if he was
“only doing it ironically at first,” replied, “Well sort of”—then added that,
before he was red-pilled, he knew Jewish people were “weird” and “ran
everything,” but he hadn’t yet become a Holocaust denier or a fascist as he
was now.48
Conspiracy theories, particularly those peddled by Alex Jones, Paul
Joseph Watson, and their multimedia Infowars operation, also played a key
role in the “red-pilling” process for many of the people Bellingcat identified
as dedicated fascists.
“Conspiracy theories appear to be one of the more well-trodden roads
into fascist nationalism,” it reported. A key example was provided by a
Discord user using the nom de plume Harleen Kekzel, who claimed to have
identified at the age of sixteen as a “polyamorous genderqueer masculine
leaning pansexual” and that Alex Jones started her on the journey to
becoming “red-pilled”—or rather that she “was conspiracy pilled” along
with her husband.49
However, for all his usefulness, Jones and Infowars actually are viewed
with considerable skepticism by many serious fascists who dismiss them as
“controlled opposition.” Jones, who denounced David Duke after having
him on his program, is generally viewed as too compromised and too
milquetoast for serious National Socialists—as are other right-wing pundits
with a conspiracist bent, such as Michael Savage and David Horowitz, both
of whom are Jewish.
 The most striking and powerful pathway to radicalization for these
young fascists, however, was YouTube.
“Fascists who become red-pilled through YouTube often start with
comparatively less extreme right-wing personalities, like Ben Shapiro or
Milo Yiannopolous,” Bellingcat reported. “One user explained that he was a
‘moderate republican’ before ‘Steven Crowder, Paul Joseph Watson, Milo
Yiannopolous, Black Pidgeon Speaks,’ and other far-right YouTubers
slowly red-pilled him. Over time he ‘moved further and further right until
[he] could no longer stand them. That’s why [he likes] those groups even
still, because if we just had the Fascists, we’d never convert anyone.’”50
The serious fascists, however, view the alt-right as having something of
an image problem, particularly in how it appropriates mainstream cartoon
and humor imagery, like Pepe the Frog, who is widely recognized as the alt-
right’s chief mascot. “Fascist activists view the alt-right as silly, but also as
a crucial recruiting ground,” noted Bellingcat.51
And it doesn’t get much sillier—or stranger and ultimately disturbingly
toxic—than the Church of Kek.

________

You may have seen the name bandied about on social media, especially in
political circles where alt-right activists and avid Donald Trump supporters
lurk. Usually it is brandished as a kind of epithet, seemingly to ward off the
effects of liberal arguments, and it often is conveyed in memes that use the
image of the alt-right mascot, Pepe the Frog: “Kek!”52
Kek, in the alt-right’s telling, is the “deity” of the semi-ironic “religion”
the white nationalist movement has created for itself online—partly for
amusement, as a way to troll liberals and self-righteous conservatives both,
and partly to make a kind of political point. He is a god of chaos and
darkness, with the head of a frog, and the source of the alt-right’s memetic
“magic,” to whom white nationalists and Donald Trump alike owe their
success, according to their own explanations.
In many ways, Kek is the apotheosis of the bizarre alternative reality of
the alt-right: at once absurdly juvenile, transgressive, and racist, Kek also
reflects a deeper, pseudo-intellectual purpose that appeals to young
ideologues who fancy themselves deep thinkers. It dwells in that murky
area they often occupy, between satire, irony, mockery, and serious
ideology; Kek can be both a big joke on liberals and a reflection of the alt-
right’s own self-image as serious agents of chaos in modern society.
Most of all, Kek has become a kind of tribal marker of the alt-right: its
meaning obscure and unavailable to “normies,” referencing Kek is most
often a way of signaling to fellow conversants online that the writer
embraces the principles of chaos and destruction that are central to alt-right
thinking. Many of them like to think of it as a harmless 4chan meme—
though in the end, there really is nothing harmless about it.
The name, usage, and ultimately the ideas around it originated in
gaming culture, particularly on chat boards devoted to the World of
Warcraft online computer games, according to Know Your Meme.53 In those
games, participants can chat only with members of their own faction in the
“war” (either Alliance or Horde fighters), while opposing players’ chats are
rendered in a cryptic form based on Korean; thus, the common chat phrase
“LOL” (laugh out loud) was read by opposing players as “KEK.” The
phrase caught on as a variation on “LOL” in game chat rooms, as well as at
open forums dedicated to gaming, animation, and popular culture, places
such as 4chan and Reddit—also dens of the alt-right, where the Pepe the
Frog meme (originally an apolitical cartoon frog created by a liberal named
Matt Furie) also has its origins and similarly was hijacked as a symbol of
white nationalism.
At some point, someone at 4chan happened to seize on a coincidence:
there was, in fact, an Egyptian god named Kek. An androgynous god who
could take either male or female form, Kek originally was depicted in
female form as possessing the head of a frog or a cat and when male, a
serpent, though during the Greco-Roman period, the male form was
depicted as a frog-headed man.
More importantly, Kek was portrayed as a bringer of chaos and
darkness, which happened to fit perfectly with the alt-right’s self-image of
being primarily devoted to destroying the existing world order.
In the fertile imaginations at play on 4chan’s image boards and other
alt-right gathering spaces, this coincidence took on a life of its own, leading
to wide-ranging speculation that Pepe—who, by then, had not only become
closely associated with the alt-right, but also with the candidacy of Donald
Trump—was actually the living embodiment of Kek. And so the Cult of
Kek was born.
 Constructed to reflect alt-right politics, the online acolytes of the
“religion” in short order constructed a whole panoply of artifacts of the
satirical church, including a detailed theology, discussions about creating
“meme magick,” books and audiotapes, and even a common prayer:

Our Kek who art in memetics

Hallowed by thy memes
Thy Trumpdom come
Thy will be done
In real life as it is on /pol/
Give us this day our daily dubs
And forgive us of our baiting
As we forgive those who bait against us
And lead us not into cuckoldry
But deliver us from shills
For thine is the memetic kingdom, and the shitposting, and
the winning, for ever and ever.
Praise KEK54

Kek “adherents” created a cultural mythology around the idea, describing

an ancient kingdom called “Kekistan” that was eventually overwhelmed by
“Normistan” and “Cuckistan.” They created not only a logo representing
Kek—four Ks surrounding an E—but promptly deployed it in a green and
black banner, which they call the “national flag of Kekistan.”
The banner’s design, in fact, perfectly mimics a German Nazi war flag,
with the Kek logo replacing the swastika and the green replacing the
infamous German red. Alt-righters are particularly fond of the way that the
banner trolls liberals who recognize its origins. It was all a goof. But it also
wasn’t.
Alt-right marchers at public events planned to create violent scenes with
leftist, antifacist counterprotesters and have appeared carrying Kekistan
banners. Others have worn patches adorned with the Kek logo.
Besides its entertainment value, the “religion” is mainly useful to the
alt-right as a trolling device for making fun of liberals and “political
correctness.” A 2017 alt-right rally in support of adviser Stephen Bannon in
front of the White House, posted on YouTube by alt-right maven Cassandra
Fairbanks, featured a Kekistan banner and a man announcing to the crowd a
“free Kekistan” campaign.
One of the leaders of the group offered a satirical speech: “The
Kekistani people are here; they stand with the oppressed minorities, the
oppressed people of Kekistan. They will be heard; they will be set free.
Reparations for Kekistan now! Reparations for Kekistan right now!”55
“We have lived under normie oppression for too long!” chimed in a
cohort.
“The oppression will end!” declared the speaker.
The main point of the whole exercise was to mock “political
correctness,” an alt-right shibboleth, and it was deeply reflective of the
ironic, often deadpan style of online trolling in general and alt-right “troll
storms” especially. Certainly, if any “normies” were to make the mistake of
taking the “religion” seriously and suggesting that its “deity” was
something they actually worshipped, they would receive the usual mocking
treatment reserved for anyone foolish enough to take their words at face
value.
Yet at the same time, lurking behind all the clownery is an idea that
altrighters actually seem to take seriously: namely, that by spreading their
often cryptic memes far and wide on social media and every other corner of
the Internet, they are infecting the popular discourse with their ideas. For
the alt-right, those core ideas all revolve around white males, the patriarchy,
nationalism, and race, especially the underlying belief that white males and
masculinity are under siege—from feminists, from liberals, from racial,
ethnic, and sexual/gender minorities.
In such alt-right haunts as Andrew Anglin’s neo-Nazi website the Daily
Stormer, references to the Kek “religion” have become commonplace, and,
besides electing Trump, Kek as the “god of chaos” has been credited at the
site with killing more than thirty people in a fire at an Oakland artists’
collective. A very early Stormer disquisition on Kek by “Atlantic
Centurion,” published in August 2015, explores the many dimensions of the
Kek phenomenon in extensive theological detail, connecting their belief
system to Buddhism and other religions.

It is the Kek the Bodhisattva who can teach our people these
truths, if we are willing to listen and to commit ourselves to
the generation of meme magick through karmic morality and
 through the mantra of memes. By refusing to cuck and by
rejecting the foul mindsets of our invaders and terrorizers,
we will move the nation away from its suffering under the
pains of hostile occupation, and closer and closer to its final
rebirth. If instead, our people cuck and adopt the foul
mindsets, they will generate not Aryan karma but further
mosaic samsara.
The trve power of skillful memes is to meme the karmic
nation into reality, the process of meme magick. By
spreading and repeating the meme mantra, it is possible to
generate the karma needed for the rebirth of the nation.56

Anglin himself frequently references Kek, making clear that he too

subscribes to the underlying meme-spreading strategy that the “religion”
represents. Describing a black artist’s piece showing a crucified frog—
which appeared to Anglin to be a kind of blasphemy of the Kek deity—he
declared that “there’s some cosmic-tier stuff going on out there.” Another
post, published in March, was headlined: “Meme Magic: White House Boy
Summoned Spirit of Kek to Protect His Prophet Donald Trump.”
Anglin devoted the post to explaining a teenager’s use of an alt-right
hand signal while meeting Trump, concluding that “the only possibility here
is that this is an example of Carl Jung’s synchronicity—seemingly acausal
factors culminating to create an event based on its meaning. But it is not
really acausal—it merely appears that way to the nonbeliever. It is our
spiritual energies, channeled through the internet, that caused this event to
manifest,” he wrote. “It is meme magic.”57
Kekistan, according to Bellingcat, is a frequent topic of discussion on
the fascist Discord servers whose chats they examined. “Opinions vary
from calling it a ‘forced meme’ to expressing serious devotion to the idea.
Kekistan flags and other regalia are often seen at Patriot Prayer rallies and
other far-right protests. Some fascists lament that many people who fly the
flag don’t understand the Nazi origins of its design. But many know exactly
what they are signaling when they put one on a flagpole, or their helmet.”58
Whether they really believe any of this or not, the thrust of the entire
enterprise is to mock everything “politically correct” so loudly and obtusely
—and divertingly—that legitimate issues about the vicious core of white
male nationalism they embrace never need to be confronted directly. The
alt-right’s “meme war” is ultimately another name for far-right propaganda,
polished and rewired for twenty-first-century consumers. The ironic pose
that Kek represents and accompanying claims that the racism they promote
is innocently meant to provoke in the end are a façade fronting a very old
and very ugly enterprise: hatemongering of the xenophobic and
misogynistic kind.
And the current running through all of this is also very ancient, very
human, and very worrisome: authoritarianism.
Chapter 8

EVERYBODY GET IN LINE

Imagine what a state can do with the immense amount of

data it has on its citizens. China is already using face
detection technology to identify and arrest people. And
here’s the tragedy: we’re building this infrastructure of
surveillance authoritarianism merely to get people to click
on ads. And this won’t be Orwell’s authoritarianism. This
isn’t 1984. Now, if authoritarianism is using overt fear to
terrorize us, we’ll all be scared, but we’ll know it, we’ll hate
it and we’ll resist it.
But if the people in power are using these algorithms to
quietly watch us, to judge us and to nudge us, to predict and
identify the troublemakers and the rebels, to deploy
persuasion architectures at scale and to manipulate
individuals one by one using their personal, individual
weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and if they’re doing it at
scale through our private screens so that we don’t even know
what our fellow citizens and neighbors are seeing, that
authoritarianism will envelop us like a spider’s web and we
may not even know we’re in it.—Zeynep Tufekci1
Now, when most of us hear the term or think about authoritarianism, we
usually do so in the context of the leaders throughout history who have
headed up authoritarian regimes—everyone from Napoleon to Hitler and
Stalin to any number of petty banana republic dictators. But that’s not what
actually makes authoritarianism work, or at least it’s not the whole story.
No authoritarian regime has ever existed without a substantial
percentage of the population it rules actively supporting and preferring it.
They all have large armies of followers who sustain them in power. So to
understand authoritarianism, it’s essential first to understand the distinctive
personality types that are attracted to it and support it.
Grappling with the human dimensions of this phenomenon has occupied
a number of psychologists, sociologists, and psychiatrists since World War
II. At times it has been analyzed as totalitarianism or totalism; in more
recent years, authoritarianism has become the preferred term in part
because it has a broader sweep.2 Some of the more recent work by
psychologist Robert Altemeyer of the University of Ontario and American
political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler has been
especially useful.3 As their studies have explored, most people have some
level of authoritarian tendencies, but these are often leveled out by such
factors as personal empathy and critical thinking skills, which tend to lead
to a less black-and-white view of the world.
Nor is authoritarianism relegated just to the right side of the political
aisle. There are also left-wing authoritarians, as any survivor of Stalinist
Russia can attest. Theirs is a variation wherein the desired utopian rule
becomes the objective.
Current Fox overblown propaganda about the dread specter of “antifa”
notwithstanding, these authoritarian tendencies on the left nevertheless have
been comparatively muted in twenty-first-century American society, at least
among mainstream liberals. Average Democrats generally fall well into the
zone of personality types that are resistant to authoritarianism, even if they
underestimate it.
I say “comparatively” mainly because we are currently awash in a flood
tide of right-wing authoritarianism that has fully reached mainstream
conservatism and overwhelmed it—the presidency of Donald Trump being
only the most obvious and powerful manifestation of it. However, this
authoritarianism began infecting the Republican Party long before Trump
ascended to the party’s nomination; it will maintain its toxic gravitational
pull on the nation’s politics long after he departs the scene. And the main
factor enabling this authoritarian toxicity all along has been conspiracism.
Are right-wing authoritarians born or made? Probably a combination of
both, though it’s clear that people’s authoritarian tendencies increase the
more fearful they are. Identifying a threat and forming a focus on it are
essential to shaping these personalities. Some are wired this way from birth.
Early theories on authoritarian personalities, now largely discredited,
argued for a Freudian model in which harsh rearing environments and
personal traumas produced people inclined to insist on a world in which
strong authorities produce order and peace.
Most analysis today finds that it usually depends on circumstances.
Because it is innate to human personalities, it can remain latent during
periods when people do not perceive a threat and increase when they do.
Authoritarianism significantly rose in the United States after 9/11. Periods
of intense social change also can produce authoritarian backlash, as such
changes are often perceived by some personalities as a kind of threat. This
is why civil rights advances, such as Black Lives Matter, have so often been
perceived as an attack on whites. It’s why white nationalists argue that
multiculturalism is a genocidal assault on the white race.4
Right-wing authoritarian (RWA) personalities are built around three
behavioral and attitudinal clusters, which are closely related groups of
human psychology that essentially shape our worldviews.

Authoritarian submission. This is the eager adherence to edicts,

rulings, and opinions of the authorities and leaders who are deemed
legitimate, built around the belief that a civil, ordered, and secure
society requires such submission.
Authoritarian aggression. This is the physical, verbal, and social
aggression displayed toward anyone or any trend that runs counter to
those authorities or, in the case of leadership, is deemed illegitimate.
Conventionalism. The adamant embrace of what is perceived as the
social norm and the “real” national identity and the belief that oneself
reflects that “real” identity.5

These three clusters interact in myriad ways and produce a long list of
identifiable traits. Altemeyer in particular has identified about a dozen such
traits.
 Such people are highly ethnocentric, inclined to see the world as their
in-group versus everyone else.
They are highly fearful of a dangerous world.
They are highly self-righteous.
They are aggressive.
They are highly prejudiced against racial and ethnic majorities, non-
heterosexuals, and women in general.
Their beliefs are a mass of contradictions dependent on
compartmentalized thinking.
They reason poorly, and they are prone to projection.
They are highly dogmatic.
They are dependent on social reinforcement of their beliefs.
Because they severely limit their exposure to different people and
ideas, they vastly overestimate the extent to which other people agree
with them.
They are prone to conspiracist thinking and a gullibility about
“alternative facts.”6

Authoritarianism as a worldview always creates a certain kind of

cognitive dissonance, a feeling of unreality, because it runs smack into the
complex nature of the modern world. The authoritarian worldview attempts
to impose its simplified, black-and-white explanation of reality onto a
factual reality that contradicts and undermines it at every turn.
People with authoritarian personalities willingly slip into the alternative
universe created by their distorted, if not deranged, epistemology because it
helps soothe this dissonance, allowing its occupants to glide over
inconvenient facts because they participate in a larger “truth.” This bubble,
as a creation of right-wing authoritarians, has always played a key role: a
refuge for people who reject factual reality, a place where they can convene
and reassure one another in the facticity of their fabricated version of how
the world works.
So conspiracism is especially appealing to people with these personality
traits—the people who tell pollsters they “don’t recognize their country
anymore” and are discomfited and bewildered by the brown faces and
strange languages that have been filling up their cultural landscapes in
places where they never used to be.
 One study found that conspiracy theories seem to be more compelling to
“those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency
in the world at large.” They often long for a 1950s-style America with
lawns and cul-de-sacs and are angry that the world no longer works that
way. Whereas the mainstream media simply present the world as it is,
conspiracy theories offer narratives that explain to them why the country is
no longer what they wish it to be, why it has that alien shape. And so in
their minds, the theories—because they never believe just one conspiracy
theory but rather an interconnected web of them—represent a deeper truth
about their world while repeatedly reinforcing their long-held prejudices
and enable them to ignore the real, factual (and often uncomfortable) nature
of the changes the world is undergoing.7
Simply put, the assembled narrative provides a clear, self-reinforcing
answer to the source of their personal disempowerment. It also has the
advantage of telling believers that they are the solo, go-it-alone action
heroes in the movies of their own lives.
The deep irony in all this, as we have seen, is that the larger
psychological and even political effect of conspiracy theories is that they
are profoundly dis-empowering in and of themselves. Conspiracists
disconnect from the rest of the world, whom they either hold in paranoid
suspicion or contempt. The narrative arc of the conspiracy universe begins
with the adrenaline rush of empowerment and ends with isolation, anger,
and potentially even violence.
There can even be outright cognitive effects, sort of a hardened
variation of the old Upton Sinclair adage: “It is difficult to get a man to
understand something, when the entire worldview around which his
emotional life revolves depends on his not understanding it.”8 People who
are “red-pilled” see themselves as utterly disattached from their
communities, fighting a desperate battle with only the help of their fellow
conspiracists against truly dark and evil forces. It’s this heroic self-
conception that really holds people inside these worlds, but in the real world
it rarely, if ever, works out well.
Alex Jones continually refers to his targets as “demonic.” It’s not just a
bleak world, it’s one in which people can become overwhelmed with
feelings of helplessness and anger in the face of existential evil. So out of
this universe proceeds a steady trickle of people who have decided it is time
to act—usually out of a desperation fueled by rage over their sense of deep
disempowerment, all of it a product of a belief in conspiracy theories.
The violence committed by these domestic terrorists serves the purposes
of authoritarians in profound ways, because it ratchets up the levels of fear
in society generally, and resorting to the false security of authoritarianism is
a common psychological response.
This is where the role played by authoritarian leaders is key. Because
rather than ease people’s fears, as a normative democratic leader would do,
authoritarians immediately reach for the panic button. Keeping the populace
in a fearful state is a cornerstone of their rule. Just ask Donald Trump.

________

While the rest of the world mourned the fifty lives lost in the March 15,
2019, attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the far right
and its trolls were celebrating. From Breitbart News to Infowars to the
sewers of 4chan, 8chan, and the Daily Stormer, extremists were
unequivocal in reveling in the massacre.9
“This is a good start,” wrote one commenter at Breitbart, beneath a
headlined story detailing the mass murders. “That man is a goddam hero,”
wrote another, as E. J. Gibney documented on Twitter. “[A] real feel good
story!” added yet another.
Someone writing as “White Pride” chimed in: “payback is a bitch! Gun
control and bans are futile!!! He is giving them another taste of their own
medicine by fighting fire with fire! An eye for an eye, Tit for Tat, quid pro
quo!!!”
“Armed Infidel” chimed in: “The rag heads could easily avoid this by
not infesting the rest of the world with their presence.” Another commenter
added: “I’ve thought about it and decided. . . . I don’t care. It’s not as
though there was any humans involved.”
Stewart Rhodes, leader of the neo-militia organization Oath Keepers,
went on Alex Jones’s Infowars program and told listeners that the terrorist’s
motives were legitimate:

When a guy who’s worried about or concerned about mass

immigration of Muslims into Europe goes crazy and kills
people, then they’re gonna blame all the rest of us who have
 the same concern. That’s how it’s gonna be used. And this is
why we have to just fight back and say, “You know what,
that doesn’t erase the fact that this is a problem. This is what
drove this guy over the edge.”

Conspiracy theorist Matt Bracken also went on Jones’s show and

appeared to urge others to follow in the terrorist’s footsteps. “The globalists
want to keep the borders open and keep flooding America and the West
with unassimilable Third-Worlders for as long as they can before there’s a
rupture,” Bracken told Jones. “What the guy . . . did in New Zealand was
try to speed it up so that the cataclysm happens sooner rather than later.”
Other white nationalists whined that the attacks made them look bad.
“Can you imagine always being blamed for things that you have absolutely
no control over? Can you imagine always being asked to apologize for
these things?” noted anti-Semite Mike Peinovich wrote on Twitter. “Can
you imagine being hated whether or not you do apologize? This is what
being a White person in America today feels like.”
The man who perpetrated the massacre left behind a manifesto crediting
Donald Trump as among his inspirations: “Trump is a symbol of renewed
white identity and common purpose.” Trump sent out a defensive tweet:
“The Fake News Media is working overtime to blame me for the horrible
attack in New Zealand. They will have to work very hard to prove that one.
So Ridiculous!”10
In a press gaggle later, Trump opined that he didn’t see white
nationalism as a problem: “I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people
that have very, very serious problems. It’s certainly a terrible thing.”11

________

Authoritarian leaders have a personality type quite distinct from their

followers. It is called social dominance orientation (SDO), which is
essentially a form of narcissism on steroids.12
SDOs are far more interested in the personal acquisition of power than
are RWAs, who by nature are more inclined to march on someone else’s
behalf. They also have different reasoning capacities and are far more
calculating and manipulative.13
 What they have in common, more than anything else, is a shared
dismissive view of equality as an important social value. They both believe
that inequality is the natural state of the world and that any attempts to
tamper with it are doomed to fail and screw everything up. Like Jordan
Peterson, the “intellectual dark web” psychologist associated with far-right
“traditionalists,” described this in a new foreword for Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag
Archipelago:

Inequality is the iron rule, even among animals, with their

intense competition for quality living space and reproductive
opportunity—even among plants, and cities—even among
the stellar lights that dot the cosmos themselves, where a
minority of privileged and oppressive heavenly bodies
contain the mass of thousands, millions or even billions of
average, dispossessed planets. Inequality is the deepest of
problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not
be solved by the presumptuous, ideology-inspired retooling
of the rare free, stable and productive democracies of the
world.14

This simultaneous contempt for attempts to overcome inequality and for

the democratic institutions intended to give ordinary people the political
power to do so is a thread that runs throughout authoritarian discourse,
among both the angry foot soldiers and their narcissistic leaders. They both
believe that there is a natural hierarchy of the gifted and the less so.15 It’s
just that SDOs tend to see themselves among the former, while RWAs are
more likely to view themselves among the latter but harbor ambitions to
rise to that other station, along the lines of the aphorism attributed to
Steinbeck: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see
themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed
millionaires.”16
Given its innate preference for autocratic rule, authoritarianism is also
toxic for any kind of democratic society. The alt-right’s express hostility to
democracy and its institutions makes its rise as a political phenomenon a
concern not just in the United States, but around the world—especially as
conspiracism begets more and more violence.
 We also run the very real risk of an era of scripted violence: the
phenomenon that occurs when a major cultural figure uses his position and
the media to call for violence against a targeted minority group and his
fanatical followers carry it out.

________

For Cesar Sayoc, becoming a follower of Donald Trump was “like my

newfound drug.” He saw himself as a warrior “on the front lines of war
between right and left.” He believed leftists had tried to kill him by
tampering with his van’s electrical wiring and blamed it on “liberal left
leaders” who “encourage attacks and violence.”17
In retaliation, he sent pipe bombs to sixteen different recipients in
October 2018, all of them targets of Trump’s incendiary rhetoric. Among
them: former president Barack Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, George
Soros, actor Robert De Niro, CNN, and the Washington Post.
The #MAGAbomber, as Sayoc, fifty-six, became known, was instantly
identified upon his arrest with his Trump sticker–festooned van. Social
media posts quickly revealed him as a steroid-abusing bodybuilder from the
Miami area who wore the red ball caps, traveled to Trump rallies, and was a
rabid fan of the president. In April 2019, he pleaded guilty to an array of
domestic terrorism charges.18
The bombing scare (the devices were incapable of harming anyone)
quickly vanished down the public memory hole. But the episode remains a
stark reminder that America has entered a new age of scripted violence—
also known as stochastic terrorism, a scenario in which “a leader need not
directly exhort violence to create a constituency that hears a call to take
action against the named enemy”—in which the president himself is writing
the scripts for others to follow and enact violence.19
A letter that Sayoc wrote to the judge in his case, released after he
entered his guilty plea, underscored the extent to which the right-wing
authoritarian cult around the president is likely to act out violently. In it,
Sayoc described attending a Trump rally in Chicago in which he was
attacked by leftist counter-protesters, whose presence he blamed on Mayor
Rahm Emanuel. Yet the string of targets—all of them verbally targeted by
Trump—made the source of his inspiration unmistakable.20
 There really has been little question, in fact, that Trump’s
hatemongering fueled not just the #MAGAbomber rampage, but a number
of other acts of terroristic violence: the synagogue massacre by white
nationalist Robert Bowers in Pittsburgh; the mosque attacks in
Christchurch, New Zealand; and a stymied domestic terrorism plot in
Illinois. Similarly, the sudden sharp increase in hate crimes of the past three
years is increasingly tied to Trump’s rhetoric, especially since a large
portion of the crimes are now accompanied by references to Trump. This
was notably the case in places where Trump held rallies, which saw a 226
percent increase in hate crimes.21
Trump has a history of encouraging violence explicitly—as when he
told rally audiences that he’d like to punch protesters, just before members
of the audiences sometimes did—as well as implicitly by rationalizing the
behavior as excusable. When two Boston men in 2015 brutally beat and
urinated on a Latino man and then credited Trump as inspiration, he made
excuses for them: “I will say that people who are following me are very
passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great
again. They are passionate. I will say that, and everybody here has reported
it.”22
How does scripted violence work? Analyst Chip Berlet explains:

The potential for violence in a society increases when the

mass media carries rhetorical vilification by high profile and
respected figures who scapegoat a named “Other.” This
dangerous “constitutive rhetoric” can build an actual
constituency of persons feeling threatened or displaced. Or
to put it another way, when rhetorical fecal matter hits the
spinning verbal blades of a bigoted demagogue’s
exhortations, bad stuff happens.
The resulting violence can incite a mob, a mass
movement, a war, or an individual actor. Individual actors
who engage in violence can emerge in three ways. They can
be assigned the task of violence by an existing organizational
leadership; they can be members or participants in an
existing organization, yet decide to act on their own; or they
can be unconnected to an existing organization and act on
their own. According to the US government definition, a
 “Lone Wolf” is a person who engages in political violence
and is not known by law enforcement agencies to have any
current or previous ties to an organization under surveillance
as potential lawbreakers. The person committing the
violence may expect or even welcome martyrdom, or may
plan for a successful escape to carry on being a political
soldier in a hoped-for insurgency. Either way, the hope is
that “a little spark can cause a prairie fire.” Revolution is
seldom the result, but violence and death remains as a
legacy.23

This plays a key role in how violence created by a tide of young men
radicalized online by far-right ideologues and conspiracy theories is spread.
Having a figure like Trump both normalizing their extremism and
encouraging violence in support of it means that it is being spread
throughout American society.
The way this finds expression is with men like Cesar Sayoc, who see
themselves as “warriors” in a larger fight against evil itself, which in their
view is embodied by liberals and leftists. This is why so many right-wing
Trump supporters speak so eagerly of launching a “civil war” against urban
liberals.24
Trump himself indulges in this “warrior” mentality. A 2017 New York
Times piece explained Trump’s worldview somewhat nonchalantly in an
article exploring why the president attacked NFL players:

In private, the president and his top aides freely admit that he
is engaged in a culture war on behalf of his white, working-
class base, a New York billionaire waging war against
“politically correct” coastal elites on behalf of his supporters
in the South and in the Midwest. He believes the war was
foisted upon him by former President Barack Obama and
other Democrats—and he is determined to win, current and
former aides said.25

Trump thus continually justified the violence inflicted by his supporters,

suggesting that the victims have it coming. Infamously, after Heather Heyer
was killed and multiple people injured by neo-Nazi James Fields in the
August 11–12, 2017, “Unite the Right” protests, Trump insisted that there
were “some very fine people” among the polo-shirted men marching with
their tiki torches.26
The bigger problem is that Trump himself doesn’t need to identify the
targets, since there is a long history of domestic terrorists motivated by
ideology,rather than the authoritarian defense of a political leader.
Sometimes the two are mixed.

________

We’ll never know for certain whether accused domestic-terrorist-in-the-

making Christopher Hasson ever would have acted on the desire to spark a
racial civil war for white supremacy by committing the assassinations and
mass killing for which he had so thoroughly prepared and about which he
endlessly fantasized. We do know, however, exactly what might have been
the spark to send the fortynine-year-old coastguardsman from Baltimore on
a killing rampage, though: the impeachment of President Trump.27
Buried in Hasson’s deleted emails, along with correspondence to neo-
Nazi leaders and ruminations on his admiration for Norwegian mass killer
Anders Breivik, were his working notes for events around which he was
planning actions,notably: “what if trump illegally impeached” and “civil
war if trump impeached.”28
It’s not difficult to find where Hasson might have obtained the belief
that civil war would erupt if President Trump were to face impeachment:
after 2017,the possibility of the outbreak of a civil war became a frequent
talking point and source of speculation among right-wing pundits. The same
week Hasson’s arrest was announced, longtime Republican operative
Joseph diGenova went on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show and warned:

We are in a civil war in this country. There’s two standards

of justice,one for Democrats, one for Republicans. The press
is all Democrat,all liberal, all progressive, all left—they hate
Republicans, they hate Trump. So the suggestion that there’s
ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the
foreseeable future in this country is over. It’s not going to be.
 It’s going to be total war. And as I say to my friends,I do two
things—I vote and I buy guns.29

This seemingly hysterical pronouncement, in fact, is fast becoming a

commonplace among right-wing pundits. It has been circulating on the right
for a long while and is now being whipped up to new heights—notably, into
the mainstream of conservative movement discourse.30
After Trump’s election, the radical right’s focus turned to his rabid
defense,vowing to protect him from any kind of attempt to impeach or
otherwise remove him from office with force of arms. Moreover, this meant
characterizing organized antifascism—relabeled “antifa” to make it seem
less than benign—as an insidious, evil force that was the face of a
Communist plot to remove Trump—and of course, right from Trump’s
inauguration, small groups of anti-Trump protesters became the
embodiment of this paranoid fear.31 Leading the paranoia parade, as always,
was Alex Jones, who leveraged his considerable history of promoting the
idea of civil war into a remarkable yearlong run pushing the idea after
Trump was elected and who is still doing so today.32 So was Michael
Savage, who warned in the summer of 2017 that impeachment would mean
civil war.
Jones became especially frantic in the fall of 2017, first warning after
the Las Vegas massacre that Democrats were going to begin mowing down
Republicans soon, then hyping a nonsensical claim that, just like at
Inauguration Day, evil antifa/Communist/satanic Mars colony pedophilia
forces were plotting a nationwide strike that would paralyze the country and
create the opportunity for a coup on November 4, 2017. As with all of his
previous completely bizarre failed predictions, Jones never acknowledged
that such a coup attempt never even came close to manifesting itself in the
real world.33
Maybe, all along, the whole thing was just projection.

________

What did Michael Cohen mean by this?

Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if

he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a
 peaceful transition of power, and this is why I agreed to
appear before you today.34

The pre-prison testimony by Donald Trump’s longtime personal

attorney in February 2019 before the House Oversight Committee—which
described the president as being like a mob boss, speaking in cryptic code
that communicates an ongoing thuglike criminal intent—was shocking at
times and deeply disturbing most of all. But reflecting that Trump might try
to cling to office even after defeat at the polls was like looking into the
abyss.
It’s one thing for someone outside of Trump’s circle, particularly
anyone who’s opposed Trump, to say such a thing. However, we’re talking
about the man who was Donald Trump’s legal fixer for ten years. A man
who once said he’d take a bullet for Trump. But a man who now believes
the person to whom he gave his loyalty is in fact a “racist, a con man, and a
cheat.”
Cohen’s closing note, before he shuffled off to prison for lying to the
FBI during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election
—which felt something like a cryptic warning—came as he put the
finishing touches on describing the president he knows as a conniving
charlatan who gets his way the same way any mob boss does: by
demanding undying fealty from his underlings, by being an absolute
authoritarian.
Cohen provided a little more context by noting that he had long been
party to Trump’s wrongdoings but that he could no longer bear “silence and
complicity in the face of the daily destruction of our basic norms and
civility to one another” as a consequence. Among the most longstanding of
those norms, of course, has been the peaceful handover of power by
American politicians when they lose elections.
Yet Trump himself raised the specter of an American president who
refused to leave office even before winning election in 2016 when he
adamantly refused to say whether or not he would concede the election to
Hillary Clinton if he were to lose, telling a debate audience coyly, “I’ll tell
you at the time. . . . I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?”35 He set the stage to
never concede the election if he chose not to. “This whole election is being
rigged,” Trump would tell his roaring crowds. “The whole thing is one big
fix. One big ugly lie. It’s one big fix.”36
 At a press conference held to announce whether he would concede,
Trump told reporters:

I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and

supporters, and to all of the people of the United States, that
I will totally accept the results of this great and historic
presidential election . . . if I win.37

The outcome negated any need to test Trump’s willingness to ignore

precedent, of course.
Politico’s Jack Shafer reviewed Trump’s options and concluded that the
reality is that he doesn’t have many when it comes to clinging to power in
the face of an election loss, although postponing the election always
remains one of them—and breaking precedent seems less like an obstacle
with this president than it does an incentive.38 Yet as the Washington Post’s
Aaron Blake observed, Trump’s odds of success in any event would be
extremely low.39
However, Trump himself has rarely been dissuaded by low odds, if his
history as a politician is anything to judge by. Moreover, there is one
possibility that neither Shafer nor Blake pays much attention to but which
happens to be the scenario a classic populist authoritarian might deploy: an
appeal to a popular uprising to prevent his removal. In other words, green-
lighting the civil war his followers have begun discussing with fevered
rhetoric.
The problem is that this scenario becomes more likely as Trump himself
becomes increasingly authoritarian when his power is challenged. And the
army of authoritarian followers has made it explicit in multiple online rants
and Twitter threats that they dream of a day when they can take up arms on
behalf of the president. This is a running current through the QAnon
movement.
Conspiracism creates a toxic mindset, a worldview in which the world
is actually being run by secretive, powerful schemers intent on suppressing
the believers, against whose immense power an ordinary individual is
almost entirely powerless. Even their neighbors are suspect. The people
who are “red-pilled” have been primed not just to hate their liberal
neighbors, but to prepare to eliminate them. And they have a leader who
appears inclined not only to let them, but to encourage, perhaps even
empower, them.
This is the real-life manifestation of Altemeyer’s “lethal union” of right-
wing authoritarian followers with a social dominance–oriented authoritarian
leader: that moment, as Altemeyer says, when “the two can then become
locked in a cyclonic death spiral that can take a whole nation down with
them.”

________

In the end, the question everyone should ask themselves is: what happens if
I take this red pill?
It promises being awakened to “the way things really are,” like in The
Matrix. Except . . . The Matrix is fiction. And so is any “red-pilled” version
of reality comprised of the thin gruel of conspiracy theories and conjecture:
fictions, when examined with any rigor, created by a cluster of self-
described “antiglobalists” whose concocted universe becomes a conduit for
white nationalist extremism.
People who sell the “red pill”—usually desperate for fellows in the
increasingly isolated worlds they inhabit—want you to believe that you are
freeing yourself from a worldview created by a nefarious cabal of Jewish
scholars or perhaps moneygrubbing bankers, something along the
traditional lines.
What they’re not telling you is that when you take it, you are submitting
yourself wholly to a universe created by a weird agglomeration of paranoid
personalities and white nationalist bigots. They don’t tell you that, once you
swallow the pill and are inside the universe, there really isn’t any dissent
regarding what is real or not. And what is real is what the leading voices of
the theories—Alex Jones, or Q, or the alpha dogs of the online communities
where conspiracies and “evidence” are produced and regurgitated endlessly
—tell everyone it is. It’s a reality constructed and ordered by people
claiming that reality is constructed and ordered by someone else: an endless
hall of mirrors.
And if you’ve taken it, it’s worth wondering what you’ve done to
yourself. Eventually your example—depending on how far along the
narrative arc you are—will stand as a warning to anyone considering
swallowing the red pill.
 Sure, at first it was empowering and exciting. It was more than an
adrenaline rush—it became positively addictive, especially a participatory
conspiracy theory like QAnon. But as time wore on, the seamy side of this
world—the scams, the easy and loose relation with facts, the willingness to
backstab—began to wear thin.
Pretty soon, you’re isolated. Your family won’t talk with you, and your
old friendships have mostly died away. You’re alienated from your
colleagues, and you don’t know whom to trust. Even your neighbors are
suspects. The only friends you have are people inside the “red-pilled”
world, and as time wears on, there are increasing problems with them, too.
If you go to a traditional or even evangelical church, you eventually find
that you can no longer trust them, either.
You no longer vote; you no longer participate in the political process at
all, because you’ve come to believe democracy is a joke. So you also have
zero political power. After a while the isolation and frustration and anger
become intense.
That’s what red-pilling actually does: it promises freedom, and it
eventually binds you in cords that creep around you in your sleep.
So let’s consider a blue pill: an antidote to this bizarre epistemological
pill promising to awaken you but that actually puts you to sleep. A pill that
would honestly awaken people to an embrace of traditional reality and
normative versions of factuality and reason.
What would that look like?
Chapter 9

A PILL FOR HEALING

When we consider further the social and psychological roots

of the collective urge to kill the world, we are likely to see
more of ourselves in it and to begin to think of such groups
as something of a dark underside or “cultural underground”
of our own society. We are also likely to discover that
whatever renders our society more decent and more
inclusive in its benefits is likely to undermine the totalistic
impulse to destroy everything. But since that impulse will
not disappear, we had better continue to bring our
imaginations to bear on confronting and exploring it, on
finding the means to resist its lure and oppose its destructive
projects.
—Robert Jay Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It1

BuzzFeed reporter Joseph Bernstein befriended Lane Davis well before he

stabbed his father to death on Samish Island—“Seattle4Truth” was one of
his key sources for an exposé of Milo Yiannopoulos that Bernstein
published in 2016, along with several other “researchers” who specialized
in Gamergate and Pizzagate conspiracy theorists.
 He was shocked by the murder and traveled to the remote, generally
soggy little western Washington town to compose an insightful piece about
its aftermath. Like me—I attended several of Lane’s hearings, which
culminated in him copping a guilty plea that put him behind bars for the
next seventeen years—Bernstein found Davis’s family unwilling to talk to
the press. Considering how much they lost, no one can really blame them.2
He also kept exploring the important subtext of Lane Davis’s story:
namely, how conspiracism and extremist ideas can unhinge people to such a
remarkable extent that they will kill other people, even their own parents—
and, more important, whether there is anything we can do about it, both
collectively as a society and individually as ordinary people.
The very difficult truth, as Bernstein found, is that many hundreds of
thousands of people absorb and participate in conspiracy theories without
ever becoming so unhinged that they act out violently and commit mass
murder. Indeed, although an extraordinarily high percentage of mass killers
hold conspiracist worldviews, which play a significant role in the
disconnectedness and isolation that fuels these actors, in reality they
comprise only a small percentage of the total number of people who
participate in this alternative universe.3
That tells us there is no singular, one-size-fits-all, easy-to-swallow
answer, no “blue pill” that could prevent Lane Davis from stabbing his
father or Stephen Paddock from opening fire on a country music festival.
And there’s no easy way of predicting or mapping exactly what beliefs or
ideas eventually will result in tragedy.
“The truth is, as researchers of violent extremism like James and
Horgan will tell you, the vast majority of people who use Gab and
Stormfront will never commit a violent crime,” he wrote. “That’s not to
absolve online communities of the beliefs of their members. It’s not to say
digital spaces can’t play a major role in ushering people toward violence.
As the lasting influence of Anwar al-Awlaki and Dylann Roof show, they
can. It’s not even to say such spaces have a right to exist on private hosting
services. They don’t—at least not as far as the First Amendment is
concerned. But there isn’t an easy answer when it comes to finding the
small number of people who will commit extremist violence.”4
Bernstein’s retrospective explained:
 Researchers have long known that the common risk factors
for violent extremism have no real predictive power. A
February 2018 literature review prepared for the Department
of Homeland Security by the research giant RTI
International found that “it is unrealistic to expect that the
presence of any risk factor—or even the combination of
several risk factors—can or will predict ‘with any accuracy’
whether an individual will engage in violent extremism.”
Indeed, the risk factors are all backwards-looking. Applying
them to the general population makes that obvious.
Take a few of the big ones: a feeling of moral outrage,
identification with an in-group perceived to be under threat,
and underemployment. That describes a lot of violent
extremists. It also describes a lot of journalists. Even if you
add more specific risk factors, like mental health issues,
having a criminal history, and a recent triggering event like a
death or a divorce, well, that could still describe a lot of
people who will never even consider violence. It’s
impossible to come up with a checklist of risks and pop out a
violent extremist.5

It would be a mistake for any program intended to prevent the

downward spiral into violence to try basing its prescription on a
psychological map, mainly because the human variables involved are so
large. “The permutation of risk factors raises an uncomfortable possibility:
that the route to violence is so complex and unique that there is no
meaningful way to map it,” says Bernstein. “As much as we want to talk
about structural forces like socioeconomics and racism in determining who
becomes violent and who doesn’t, an impossibly huge number of individual
variations appear to play a significant role as well.”6
One of the insidious aspects of conspiracism is that it has a built-in
immunity to what might be a normative means of drawing people out of
that belief system—namely, a rational and reasoned application of factual
evidence and logic. Anyone who tries to persuade someone who’s been
“red-pilled” with such methods quickly finds themselves dismissed as either
a willing dupe or an active coconspirator. Like most right-wing
authoritarians, their compartmentalized thinking enables them to believe
two completely contradictory things at once and to ignore factual evidence
when presented as “tainted.”
The narratives that bind people to conspiracy theories are often large-
scope mythologies that make them feel heroic as well as part of something
bigger. These are normal drives in human beings but have been twisted by
the disinformation to which they’ve been exposed. These mythologies are
also highly personalized and often gut-level in nature. This is why there are
no immediate, large-scale solutions to the problem, fixable through mass
media or other appeals.
So there really is no “blue pill,” as it were, no universally applicable
remedy that would cure people of their conspiracy-bred delusions. The only
way to actually draw people out of the conspiracist universe and back into
the sometimes murky light of the real world is on a one-to-one basis, one at
a time, very slowly, and with an emphasis on empathy—as well as an
understanding that even the best efforts in these areas often fail.
It’s a slow, often painful, and only sometimes rewarding process. But
for people determined to not simply cope with this phenomenon in their
lives, but to confront and overcome it, there’s not really any other option.

________

What is nearly universal about conspiracy theorists and the “red-pilled”

ideologues who are sucked into the darkest corners of authoritarian
ideologies by them is that their personal lives are nearly always in
shambles. They alienate family members, old friends, new friends,
neighbors, business and work associates, customers, you name it—they
churn through relationships like raccoons through a trash pile, picking up
and discarding with startling ease.7
For family and old friends, this ongoing churn and otherworldly
alienation is extremely disorienting and frequently heartbreaking. But as it
happens, these are the people with the greatest likelihood of changing the
trajectory of a redpilled person and perhaps drawing them back into the
normative world and the warmth of healthy human relationships.
It’s a very difficult proposition, however, and carries many risks. The
first is that many such attempts actually drive the red-pilled true believers
even deeper into their rabbit holes. You may think you’re doing the right
thing by plopping facts in front of them, but it’s more likely to worsen
things. Multiple studies have demonstrated that the most common response
to this approach is for the conspiracy theorists to see your facts as further
proof of the conspiracy—as well as clear evidence of your gullibility, at
least, if not your active complicity in the plot.
Radicalization expert Peter Neumann acknowledges that there are
innate limitations to this approach. “There is a big debate around to what
extent counter-messaging is possible and to what extent that can ever
work,” he says. “I think in most cases, when you’re talking about extremists
rather than conspiracy theories, in most cases it was a face-to-face
interaction that pulled people out, and I don’t think it’s easy to convince
people on the Internet that they are wrong about these things.
“And if you do it badly, it may actually have the opposite effect. This is
what psychologists call reactance, which is the idea that if you confront
someone who is very entrenched in their views and you’re trying to
convince them of the opposite, you’re actually provoking resistance, and
with the result that that person becomes even more entrenched in their
views.”
Secondarily, your relationship with the person will further fray and
destabilize along the way. If they are prone to anger—and most conspiracy
theorists seem to be—you well could bear the brunt of it and all that entails.
Neumann warns: “Of course, one of the first things that is important to
understand is that not everyone can be deradicalized. So, if you have
someone that is very deep in those conspiracies, is very convinced about
them, and feels very happy and comfortable with that identity, it’s very hard
to pull them out. It’s like if you have someone who’s a hardened neo-Nazi
and who is moving within that milieu who is perhaps also having, let’s say,
a family relationship or relationships within that group of people, it’s very
hard to pull him or her out.
“Deradicalization can work, in two situations. The first arises when
people are still exploring and before their extremist identities are being
settled, so if you get them at an early enough stage while they’re still having
a degree of openness about the different questions that they are exploring,
you can still engage them. And the other situation where deradicalization
can work is at the very end of the process when people start having doubts,
start becoming disillusioned, or for other reasons really are looking for a
change.
 “I used to be a smoker myself. It’s like quitting smoking. . . . [P]eople
will tell you that it’s not possible to quit smoking unless you really want it,
unless you are convinced that you want to change your lifestyle. And I
think the same is true with extremists or people who are very deep in these
weird theories. Unless they themselves have questions that you can leverage
and unless they themselves are having doubts that you can work with, it’s
basically not possible.”8
So the first question any person trying to tackle the problem should ask
themselves is, will it be worth it? Be honest with yourself and about the
other person, because that will be crucial.
However, if you decide to proceed and try to help someone who has
become enmeshed in conspiracy theories and the extremist ideologies that
accompany them, I’ve assembled a number of steps for doing so, compiled
from the best advice available from experts—psychologists, sociologists,
researchers, and activists with real-life experience drawing people out of the
rabbit holes and back into the bright light of normative reality.
The key, again, in all this is the human variables: every person is
different, every path down into the rabbit holes is personal, every force
keeping the red-pilled trapped inside their alternative universe varies from
case to case. And always keep in mind that success is difficult and rare.
Every choice you make depends on the circumstances, personality, and
beliefs of the person involved.
Whether this one-at-a-time, interpersonal, and typically slow approach
ever gains enough momentum to solve the problem on a large scale is
anyone’s guess. “Everyone is looking for the silver bullet, and it doesn’t
exist,” says Neumann. “It’s something that requires education. It’s
something that will not happen within the next couple of months, but maybe
the next couple of decades if people really get behind it, but it’s a really
hard, long-term project.”
At the same time, most of us see no other options—we just know we
must try.
So I engaged some of the best minds on this subject in extended
conversation and asked them: if you could devise a toolkit that ordinary
people could use to bring their friends and loved ones out of the dark world
of conspiracy theories and back into the sunlight of reality, what would it
look like?
 After listening to their advice, I compiled an incremental, step-by-step
set of conceptual approaches to the problem—tools, as it were—that
ordinary people can use. There are fifteen of them.

Fifteen Steps

1. First, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: the most

effective way of overcoming the effects of “red-pilling” is
immunizing people beforehand.

Psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky recommends working incrementally

with people who have had little exposure to conspiracy theories: “Now we
do know that what tends to work is to inoculate people against conspiracy
theories by exposing people to the theory ahead of time and saying, well
you know, if you ever come across this, be aware of the fact that it’s
complete nonsense. And that can be done; a colleague of mine, Karen
Douglas, has done that with anti-vaccination conspiracy theories.
“She finds that if you expose people to a small dose, just like a vaccine,
of the conspiracy theory up front, then it finds less traction when people are
actually exposed to it. So you can educate, sort of protect people against
conspiracy theories, but of course the crucial is you got to get to them first,
because if you try to do it after they’ve already been exposed to it then it’s
far less effective. So you have to get people educated about the existence of
theories ahead of time.
“And it has to be proactive. Now of course, there’s a risk in that as well.
Some people might never encounter conspiracy theory and if you had never
mentioned it, they would have never gone on the Internet to look it up. So
you may have in fact protected some people, but inadvertently tip others
into the rabbit hole.
“Nothing is perfect and that is an obvious risk: that if you’re exposing
people to something to protect them against it, then that may backfire
conceivably. Now the other thing is that what colleagues and I have done
repeatedly is to look at the reasoning flaws that are part of conspiracy
theories—one of them being the pure chance of it, and the other one being
the unrealized implications of some of those claims.”9
Information scientist Michael Caulfield believes that the most effective
form of immunization comes from teaching young people better methods of
consuming digital information. That’s especially the case, he says, in the
new age of conspiracism, when everything connects like an elaborate
Tinkertoy set. It adds a level of complexity that most people are unprepared
to deal with.
“The newer thing is the absolute connection between all of these
conspiracies,” Caulfield says. “The truth is, almost everybody believes in
one conspiracy. Almost everybody. This is true going back a long time. You
can go back to the ’70s, ’80s, or whatever. You’ll find that people believe in
one conspiracy or another.
“I think what is happening increasingly now is that people get into the
one conspiracy that everybody is going to get into anyway. They’re going to
choose a conspiracy and be into it. But the conspiracy communities are very
connected—the viral mechanics across these communities are very
connected—and then the bad actors in this space are very aware of how to
pull people in from relatively harmless conspiracies, deeper into other
conspiracies.
“I saw this horrifying YouTube video that was basically an anti-Semitic,
Jews-control-the-world video, but of course none of it said that explicitly. It
was an animated thing with a voiceover, and you’ve seen these sorts of
things. But a big piece of it was, ‘Oh, society is trying to medicate you, and
there’s a big conspiracy to try to keep you medicated, or from seeing the
truth,’ and so forth.
“I just thought about how compelling this would be for someone who
had been on Ritalin all their life, or something like that. Looking at this
saying, ‘Yeah, what’s that all about?’ and having some actual fear and
concern that, what if there is a pharmaceutical conspiracy to keep us all
medicated?
“Of course the piece of it that was really smart, in this horrific way,
about what this person was doing, was as you looked at the imagery, if you
were literate in this, you saw, oh what they’re looking up to is actually this
Jewish-controlled, banker-funded conspiracy to keep everybody down. But
of course that doesn’t pop out to the person first watching the video. What
pops out is, ‘Oh, this is validation for what I feel.’ So they’re very smart in
how they go into these things.”
Caulfield believes that an understanding of context is essential for
effective digital literacy. “I do really believe that if on day one you’re
looking at that video, and you realize, ‘Hey, wow, this is a video put out by
a group of literal neo-Nazis,’ I think you would back off of it.
“But through this process of grooming, whether it’s algorithmic
grooming, which just sort of happens via YouTube’s algorithms or whether
it’s grooming by bad actors explicitly, this process relies on you not fully
understanding your destination until you’re in it.
“My belief is that the process works because you don’t understand what
the destination is of this stuff, before you’re already so deep into it that
you’re living in a different epistemology.”10
Most people outside the epistemic bubble, however, don’t see that
there’s a destination. All most people see is that you’re having a
conversation with someone in a chat room or a forum for conversation,
which becomes a mechanism for recruitment that can be used across all
kinds of digital platforms. Video gamers, for instance, will go into a video
chat room, hanging out with other players; pretty soon someone starts
bitching about how “social justice warriors” want to ruin their first-person
shooter games. That it’s a feminist conspiracy and so on. Then someone
pipes up: “Well, you know why they’re doing that, right? It’s all about
cultural Marxism.” And soon the whole chat room is getting filled in on the
nefarious work of those Jews in the Frankfurt School and down the rabbit
hole they go.
Caulfield explains that this is heightened by how we teach kids to
research information on the Web, exemplified by the bizarre radicalization
spiral of biased curation that helped Dylann Roof dive off the deep end.
“You’ve got this loaded search-term problem, right? So when you see this
cycle, . . . someone says, ‘Oh, it’s all about cultural Marxism,’ and then you
go and read the stuff: you plug ‘cultural Marxism’ into the search engine.
But because of the curation loop, you’re not going to get a relatively
academic treatment of how the Frankfurt School changed the application of
Marxist thought to contemporary cultural issues.
“You’re going to get all this stuff, which is going to have more terms,
and each thing you read is going to have more terms and more examples.
They’ll pull out one example of this that’s particularly advantageous to
what they’re arguing, and you google that example. And of course who is
talking about that example?
“Is it NBC News? No, because the example usually is this one-off event
where some unknown feminist said something to someone. It’s a nothing
thing. The only place it’s a something thing is in this misogynistic world
where you’re actually dealing with a white supremacist community. So you
get pulled deeper and deeper into it, step by step by this.”
This, he says, is the model we teach young people for researching
information on the Internet, built on older models in which publication of
information was more carefully vetted, which are inadequate for an age in
which deliberate disinformation is not merely common but often pervasive,
depending on the platform.
“It’s a model of reacting and going deeper,” Caulfield says.
“Interestingly, it’s a model that involves a lot of reading. It involves a lot of
deep reading of all these texts, and my qualms with the media literacy and
info-literacy we give students is that what we teach students to do is to
deeply read texts and look at the internal logic of them and to think about
the arguments.”
This is a bad thing when it comes to white nationalist propaganda and
dis-information. “This is not what you actually want them to do with this
stuff,” he explains. “What you want them to do with this stuff is: ‘Please
dear God, stop reading until you know where this came from, what its
agenda is, and how it fits into broader expert, or reporting, or any broader
consensus, right?
“So we teach students to dive in and read deeply and think deeply about
these things—but this is just really bad advice.”
Caulfield has constructed a model with the acronym SIFT: stop,
investigate, find, trace. It emphasizes teaching young would-be researchers
to contextualize their information before they absorb it. Once they’re at a
website, stop and look at what else that site does, how reliable its
information appears to be, who runs it, and what, if any, agenda it has. And
then keep expanding the context.
“The first move in SIFT is stop. Stop reading, just don’t do anything.
Stop. Before you go deeper into this stuff, before you read it, before you
react, before you get angry, before you start going into search term after
search term, and these sorts of things: stop.
 “I is investigate the source. F is find better coverage. T is trace claims,
quotes, and images to the original context and see if they’re being
misportrayed.
“The idea is, if we can get people to, in a sense, read less and react less,
we can maybe break that cycle, which gains such a momentum. And you
just see it. I saw it with a family member of my own. Not deep into the
white supremacist territory, thankfully, but into some other things that were
extremist, the Seth Rich sort of stuff.
“It happens too quickly, but it happens because these people are actually
being voracious readers and voracious ‘researchers,’ but they’re not
actually orienting themselves to the discourse that they’ve landed
themselves in.”

2. Immunization, of course, is not always possible. Most of the time

conspiracism shows up at our dinner tables unannounced. Prepare to
be blindsided, so arm yourselves with knowledge.

Stephen Lewandowsky was drawn into the world of conspiracism and

disinformation when he composed a scientific paper examining theories
denying that global climate change is a reality. “What we did in the paper
that we wrote about was to explore the implications of that claim,” he says.
“What that actually means and what would have had to be true for that
claim to be true. When you look at that, then you find that the claim just
falls over in a heap because the moment you start thinking about what the
implications are, it just becomes ridiculous.”
He found that an early application of scientific rigor was helpful, but it
only helped when people promoting denialist climate theories had to face
consequences within their scientific peer communities for their own
frequent lack of rigor. “One thing that might be helpful is to expose people
to the consequences of their own faults and it becomes obvious very often
to anyone who is capable of standard cognition that the claim just makes no
sense because the implications don’t materialize,” he says.
“Then the other thing we know about conspiracy theories is that they
tend to come together in clusters so people tend to believe more than one
conspiracy. If you believe one, then chances are you’ll believe more than
one. It’s not just an isolated thing.
“People tend to believe in multiple conspiracies and that also identifies
them as being a particular type of person, because it’s not just that they have
information about Pizzagate that no one else has, but that they actually have
a personality or cognitive style that makes them susceptible to believing a
lot of weird things. So, first of all, that’s an important thing to tell others
who you might protect against conspiracy theories by just noticing that,
hang on, people who believe one conspiracy also believe in another. Do you
really want to believe in all that stuff?”
That, however, assumes they haven’t already become ensnared.
“Reaching the people who have gone down the rabbit hole is extremely
difficult because one of the problems now is that on the Internet they will
find support in their views that seems strong,” Lewandowsky says. “This is
one of the really pernicious aspects of the Internet as completely
underappreciated in my view: the social signals you get on the Internet are
completely miscalibrated. I can believe anything I want no matter how
absurd. I’ll find a thousand people on Facebook who share my views,
whatever they may be. I can say the Earth is flat or Obama is a lizard
person, and somebody will share that view.
“At the moment people have a community, they become entrenched in
those views. And that is what makes it more difficult to break than it used to
be, because at least thirty years ago, people knew they were cranks because
no one else believed anything that they said, but that’s no longer true. Now
people have the Internet and they get back up from a thousand others.
Which is a trivially small number given how many people are on Facebook,
but it’s sufficient to create an illusion of support.
“At the moment you find a community, that’s it. You’re stuck in the
rabbit hole and you’re no longer feeling isolated because there are these
other people egging you on.”
Lewandowsky cautions that “you’re talking about a certain type of
person who falls into that rabbit hole”—namely, authoritarian personalities.
“That is triggered by their personal circumstances and their feeling of
alienation from society, and there’s some evidence to suggest that,” he says.
For example, the people who believe everything Donald Trump says are of
a certain type, right? Not everybody falls for Trump, quite the contrary.
 “So the difficulty is that a lot of the fertile ground for this nonsense—
for Trump and conspiracy theories and everything else—is political in
nature. And it’s the politics of the last twenty or thirty years that have just
disempowered a lot of people, or they feel that they have lost out, regardless
whether that feeling is real or not.
“All of this is unfolding against a political structure that is extremely
difficult to change, and finding the antidote is almost impossible without
changing the politics or changing society at large.”

3. Your relationship with the person is what will guide them out of the
rabbit hole.

The most powerfully toxic effect of conspiracism is that it isolates people—

cuts them off from the rest of society, encourages them to walk away from
it, from democratic institutions, from their own political franchise. Friends
and coworkers peel away gradually as they grow uncomfortable with the
conspiracist’s growing obsession. Family members become alienated as the
red-pilled begin insisting that they convert to their belief system, usually
claiming they’re doing so for everyone’s protection.
Eventually their only social contact is with other true believers. That
becomes their community—and after a while, they can’t even trust those,
right? In a very powerful way, when people dive down the conspiracist
rabbit holes, they lose touch with their own humanity.
So any kind of sincere attempt at empathetic or—more importantly—
non-judgmental exchange of personal contact with a conspiracy theorist is
likely to have some reasonable chance of success, because they often are
starved for a sympathetic ear. However, during these initial stages, they’ll
remain highly suspicious, typically paranoid, and on the lookout for any
sign of disrespect or judgment that they are crazy or stupid—all things they
have heard many times before.
Dishonesty in these situations is always disastrous, but so is too much
transparency. The ideal approach is a clinical one: think of yourself as
someone conducting an interview in a professional manner, one in which
the questions have already been laid out and the nature of your query is
constrained by them.
 Sociologist Samantha Kutner, who has researched both the organizing
principles of far-right Proud Boys as well as methods of deradicalization,
says she often thinks of Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical concept of identification
when approaching these situations—that is, in order for any kind of
persuasion to take place, one or both parties involved must “identify” with
the other. So when starting out—whether with an established relationship or
with a new one—it’s essential to find common ground over which you can
bond, at least a little.
“I like seeing how something resonates with an individual,” Kutner
says, most particularly, “whether when you see someone else’s plight,
whether you empathize with them and want to support them.” She says that,
as with any human exchange, it’s essential to play it by ear, roll with the
punches, and maintain your own integrity in the relationship. It’s even
possible to gently mock them, she says.
“There has to be a gentle kind of pro-social way to respond to these
people that’s like, ‘Hey, you’re wrong. But we still care about you,’” Kutner
says. “The tone is hard to replicate, but the times that I’ve been able to do it,
it’s been successful. I’m sure there are other people that are into the pro-
social trolling where, yes, you’re mocking them, but you’re not doing it in a
way that’s showing that you dehumanize them. It’s just nudging them in a
certain direction or hoping they see something.”
C. V. Vitolo, a professor of debate at University of Wisconsin–Madison
and one of the activists involved in direct contact with deradicalization
work, explains that “recognizing that radicalization is a process and not a
state of being and that it is worthwhile to intervene at any point in that
process” are fundamental to any kind of success.
“And so just because you are not good at dealing with full-blown 14/88
Nazis doesn’t mean that you don’t have a role to play in stopping
radicalization. Don’t sell yourself short or think your interventions are small
if you’re intervening at the beginning or the middle of the radicalization
process.”
The next fundamental, in Vitolo’s view, is the human connection.
“Relationships are the key,” she says. “There are people who, it took me
two, sometimes even three years to get through to, who started very strong
in one direction and had to work piece by piece from outright to civic
nationalists to libertarian, and eventually becoming a little bit more properly
left leaning, in my opinion. And that’s something that’s not possible if
someone doesn’t have some kind of trust-based relationship with you.
“That process of repetition is so important. Relationships don’t just
afford you trust, they also afford you the ability to say things over and over
and over to people. And repetition has a big impact. If you only hear
someone make an argument once, no matter how good it is, it’s not
necessarily going to sit with you. That’s not how our brains work. We don’t
take a piece of information and process it through every single thing we
know, you know?”

4. Therefore, the key to all of your actions is empathy—not blind,

unquestioning empathy, but the mindful kind, attuned to the faults of
the other person and maintaining normal moral boundaries, while
also being willing to simply listen.

If your goal is to help another person emerge from the conspiracist cocoon
through the gravitational pull of your relationship, then large doses of
empathy and forbearance will be required on your part. This is always much
easier said than done, especially because red-pilled people are so often
angry, contentious, suspicious, and generally cantankerous.
Samantha Kutner says that avoiding a really confrontational approach is
key. She describes her sessions as “more of a respectful listening. Being
willing to listen to them.” She says she studied psychologist Carl Rogers’s
“nondirective approaches” to interviewing subjects, which helped her
tremendously.
Maintaining this empathetic approach, however, should never mean
sacrificing the boundaries of fundamental human behavior—violence and
threats are always intolerable, whether directed at you or anyone else. And
you should never sacrifice those boundaries for the sake of maintaining the
relationship.
As journalist Noah Berlatsky has observed, empathy as a simple
principle is a two-edged sword that can make the world better, but it can be
used to make things worse. “The problems with empathy bias are
compounded by the fact that it’s possible to weaponize empathy to create
support for ugly political programs, and even for violence,” he writes.
“Trump leverages our empathy bias by presenting himself as the
spokesperson for good, normal, white people against untrustworthy,
dangerous, racial others. When he talks about immigrants, for example,
Trump constantly aligns himself with those he claims are victims of
immigrants. He focuses on the people who will supposedly suffer when
immigrants take jobs or commit crimes.”11
Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale University, argues for a
different model of empathetic behavior he calls “rational compassion,”
which mitigates and redirects the claims of empathy. Trump’s calls for
empathy for victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, he
suggests, should elicit a search for data. “You don’t have to be a cold-
blooded utilitarian,” Bloom says, “but people should appreciate that facts
matter. If Trump says or implies that an extraordinary number of illegal
immigrants are murderers and rapists, before you start putting yourself in
people’s shoes and feeling their pain, you should ask, is it true?”
C. V. Vitolo says she has grappled with how different people’s grasps of
the world can really be. She emphasizes “just the importance of holding
another person’s epistemology and of understanding a lot of this as
epistemological problems, where it’s not just that they don’t understand the
data or they don’t understand what the science says.
“Sometimes it’s not a question of, ‘Could you, in theory, separate
people into races biologically?’ Sure, you can separate people into any
number of things biologically if you wanted to. You could do it twenty
different ways. You can do whatever you want. But it’s essential to
understand: why sort people this way in the first place, right? They often
invert the scientific process. What is driving the mode of scientific inquiry
that you’re participating in?”

5. After you listen, ask the right questions.

All of this underscores, perhaps, the difficulty of attempting to deradicalize

someone when it’s being done by an ordinary person without training in
these techniques, and it reminds us that making this attempt probably means
learning new interpersonal skills that may not always be successful.
Maintaining a calm professionalism in the face of a raging conspiracy
theorist is not for the meek at heart.
Kutner recommends using Carl Rogers’s listening strategies to defuse
tense situations.12 These involve two key steps: first, seeking to understand
the other person’s ideas, then “reflecting back to them what it is you think
that they’re saying.”
“There’s a lot of, ‘This is what I think you’re saying. Is that accurate?’”
she explains. “And then going back and forth and having them identify.”
As the conversation proceeds, she says it’s essential to respond with
your questions to what they’re saying, as well as to help them to elucidate
rationally what they otherwise simply have a strong feeling about. Having
an actual back-and-forth exchange, and not purely a clinical one, works
best.
Vitolo says it’s essential that those who undertake this process
comprehend that they’re confronting an “evil that is worth dedicating a ton
of time and resources to pushing back against,” but also that they “do not
believe that the people attached to those ideologies are also just not worth
our time or are irredeemable in any way. Persuasion hinges on your ability
to be likable.
“And it’s not really likability, because usually it’s not anything that
would pass as civility in normie culture. But it is about adopting the kind of
social cues of that audience and saying things and making arguments in
ways that you know are reaching out to them on really human levels and
holding their perspectives and taking them seriously, taking their pain
seriously, taking their own causes of liberation, even if they may seem
trivial in comparison, seriously. It’s hard to find people who have that
balance of empathy and also are resilient enough to not fall for it.”

6. Don’t fall down the rabbit hole yourself while attempting to help
someone else out of it.

One of the first things that those who are attempting to draw someone out
of the red-pill rabbit hole have to do is immunize themselves from the
attractions of conspiracism. So at every step in your process of listening to
and discussing a red-pilled person’s beliefs, it’s essential to keep in mind
the distinction made in chapter 1 between conspiracies and conspiracy
theories—namely, the three primary limitations of real conspiracies
(duration, numbers of actors, scope, and breadth) and the known attributes
of conspiracy theories (the long period of time over which they occurs, their
large numbers of participants, and the global reach of the plots).
Stephan Lewandowsky says he’s frequently criticized by people asking
how he can dismiss the theories when in fact there have been real
conspiracies. His answer: “If you look at true conspiracies that we now
acknowledge have happened—like the Volkswagen diesel scandal [in which
the carmaker was caught falsifying emissions data on its cars], which is
classic conspiracy, right? That was uncovered by very conventional means.
That wasn’t cranks who invented this and then found it confirmed. No,
these were professionals that noticed some weird stuff and they investigated
that. And the same is true for Iran Contra, true for Watergate,
COINTELPRO.”
As he observes, there’s never been a real conspiracy uncovered by a
conspiracy theorist.
“The important thing . . . is [that] the cognition of the people who
uncovered these true conspiracies is usually totally straightforward,” he
adds. “I mean, they’re not cranks—they are investigative journalists or
they’re whistleblowers or they’re academics or journalists. They’re
completely mainstream people whose job it is to go after the evidence. And
in contrast to that, the people who believe that NASA faked the moon
landing, if you look at how they considered the evidence, you can just
identify all these cognitive flaws. So true conspiracies exist, yes—but if you
think like a crank, you’ll never find a true conspiracy.”
A shorthand version of this, he acknowledges, is that much of the
conspiracy theories he sees are readily discarded when the people pitching
them have extensive records of promulgating misinformation, falsehoods,
and nonsense: “Often, I’m very skeptical simply because the people
involved make no sense.”
Those are the most essential and simple guides. It’s also wise never to
become cavalier about conspiracy theories and treat them as mere mental
games, diversions, or entertainments.
“In many ways there is nothing harmless about conspiracy theories,”
observes Lewandowsky. “I think it used to be the case that people cavalierly
just dismiss them as being a fringe phenomenon, and they were some weird
people out there who believe that Elvis was still alive in North Korea.
People were amused by it and would go, ‘Aha, yeah, isn’t that funny?’
“And perhaps that was appropriate at the time before the Internet came
along and gave them a mushrooming platform and before they were
recognized. I think what we’re experiencing now is that conspiracy theory
has been increasingly conducive to political extremism, and of course in a
sense that is nothing new, because the history of anti-Semitism is basically
just one big weaponized conspiracy theory. So in that sense, there is nothing
new under the sun; it is simply that we now have broader dissemination of
this. It’s much, much easier to spread this stuff, and I don’t think they’re
harmless.”
Kate Starbird warns that the newer conspiratorial appeals are
increasingly sophisticated and capable of ensnaring even well-educated
people. “I can see the rhetoric of critical thinking is used constantly within
the conspiracy theory ecosystems that we study,” she says. “They’ve
manipulated the tools of critical thinking, and they use it to take apart
reality, and in ways that are not healthy for society.
“So how do we give people the tools not to take everything apart, but to
learn how to build back some sense of what we can trust, and not to be
skeptical of everything, but to figure out what we should assign credibility
to? In terms of the next generation of digital literacy, or just information
literacy, I think that’s going to be really important for us, to figure out how
to trust things.”
Lewandowsky observes that for conspiracists, “the targets are almost
arbitrary. It’s just a matter of finding somebody you can hate. Doesn’t
matter if they’re gay or Jewish or Muslim or whatever, it’s just fulfilling the
same function, which is to give people somebody to hate, because they’re
being disenfranchised or disgruntled with their own lives and then
somebody comes along and tells them that it’s all the fault of the Jews or
Muslims or whatever and then, aha! All of a sudden they no longer have to
take responsibility for their own actions or they can blame somebody for
whatever misery they are experiencing and then some people will just go
boom.”

7. As you ask questions, search mainly for the conspiracist’s deeper

motives.
When you’re asking all these questions, you’re doing more than just getting
them to explain themselves in a way that perhaps you can understand, even
if it seems absurd and unlikely. What you’re really after is their underlying
reasons for believing these conspiracy theories to be true. Because those
reasons are the key to changing the course of their trajectory.
Although throwing facts at them in rebuttal is not merely pointless, but
counterproductive, getting them to explain their thinking coherently and
honestly has its own effect.
“It’s virtually impossible to convince them, certainly with facts, but it
becomes possible when they start having doubts about their own theory or
when they have been disillusioned for other reasons,” says Lewandowsky.
“And that’s the important thing, that it’s not . . . always about the
conspiracy theory. No, the conspiracy theory is the symptom, in many
cases, of other problems that these people are having in their own life.”
A lot of times the search leads from one buried motive to another,
deeper and farther down the path that brought them to this point in the first
place. This is especially the case when it comes to complicated hatreds like
misogyny, which usually is entangled with the person’s emotional
development and health or lack thereof. But even with simpler, more
visceral and less explicable hatreds such as racial or ethnic bigotry, a more
complex and often deeply personal experience or trauma may form its real
core.
“Someone said to me—again, someone who has a lot of practical
experience in working with neo-Nazis—she said she’s never met a happy
racist,” says Lewandowsky. “All these people who turn toward these
ideologies, toward these hateful ideologies, are often people who’ve made a
lot of wrong choices and they’re not very happy with their lives, and the
embracing of that ideology is the consequence, it’s not the cause of their
problems. So, it’s also about trying to identify what are the problems or
underlying things that may have led them to embrace that.”
C. V. Vitolo believes it’s essential to “make it intelligible to them that
there’s another world out there where you get the things that you want. The
ethnostate—it’s not an end in and of itself. It’s a means to your feelings of
security, your feelings of safety, your feelings of, honestly, futurity. . . . I
can certainly tell you that there’s a process involved that you can be an
active participant in which your needs will be taken seriously. And I think
making sure they know that the uncertainty you feel is the uncertainty
everyone feels. And you don’t have to control it all to know that you’ll be
given a fair shake.”

8. Recognize that these underlying motivations and needs have other

ways of being met—so find them.

The very personal needs and motives that fuel most conspiracists’ attraction
to them are not easily generalized—sometimes they arise from individual
traumas, sometimes from idiosyncratic upbringings, or their own personal
wiring, and they are often related to the nuances of the widely varying
material realities of their daily lives.
However, there are threads that also run through conspiracism and the
authoritarian personalities drawn to them that often surface with deeper
questioning. A common theme that comes out is the heroic ideal: many if
not most red-pilled conspiracists see themselves as part of a heroic effort to
save whatever is the focus of that person’s motives: their families, their
communities, their region, their nation, their entire race (“my people” is
how they usually express the latter), sometimes all of the above.
This heroic self-conception is common among right-wing extremists in
part because they often have personal stories that are not so heroic, and
announcing their heroism is a means of overcoming that past. It also
becomes a useful rationalization for a wide range of behaviors, from
believing palpable nonsense to committing hate crimes.
Indeed, it’s something they share with hate crime perpetrators. A
number of psychological studies of such criminals has found that nearly
every one of them believed they were committing a “message” crime on
behalf of their community and in its defense, believing the mere presence of
the target minority posed a threat of some kind to it. Hate criminals and
domestic terrorists both cast themselves in a heroic light. It’s central to their
self-rationalization for their acts.
Lewandowsky recalls the case of Timothy McVeigh’s accomplice in the
1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Terry Nichols. “He used to be a guy in his
mid-thirties who had not accomplished anything: he had not been able to
maintain a relationship, he had broken off his education, he wasn’t able to
maintain any jobs. By any standards, he was a bit of a loser, and he realized
it. He was very frustrated and becoming depressed about his situation,” he
recounts.
“And then at some point, he gets in touch with members in Michigan of
the Aryan Nations, and they basically changed him. He starts hanging out
with them, they embrace him, but they also give him a new philosophy,
which says to him, ‘None of this is actually your fault, it is the
government’s fault.’ And suddenly he feels very empowered and he
basically said, ‘Wow, I’ve actually been a victim. None of this has been my
fault. It’s been the government’s fault. There’s this vast conspiracy
operating against people like me. And now I’m no longer a loser; in fact,
I’m becoming a freedom fighter, I’m embracing this cause.’ And adopting
this ideology was incredibly powerful for someone like him to make sense
of his personal troubles, but also to find something that he could embrace
and work for, for the first time in his life.”
“Look at the various reasons that people are engaged in conspiracy
ideation and conspiratorial cultures,” Michael Caulfield explains. “One of
the big ones, of course, is it’s really easy to earn intellectual respect in these
communities, right? I mean, compared to everywhere else, where it’s
actually quite expensive to earn intellectual respect.
“If you go into the flat Earth conspiracy, you can be Stephen Hawking
in five months, the Stephen Hawking of that community. So getting
intellectual respect in those communities is actually quite cheap. You
suddenly don’t have to deal with the fact that ‘Oh, I have these opinions,
but there are people smarter than me that have other opinions, so maybe my
opinions aren’t the center of the discourse universe.’”
Caulfield was struck by a mother’s tale of deradicalization in the
Washingtonian that described a woman’s struggle when her thirteen-year-
old son joined the alt-right. Angry and resentful over a false accusation of
sexual harassment, he had gravitated into online circles (particularly at
Reddit) that discussed the plot against young white men and, eventually,
“cultural Marxism.” He tried attending a Proud Boys rally.
Eventually, meeting some of his online alt-right heroes turned out to be
disillusioning, and he peeled away from the scene. Some weeks later, he
told his mother what was going through his head.
“I’d always had my doubts,” he said. “I knew liking them was wrong.
But I wanted to like them because everyone else hated them.”
 She asked him whether he liked them.
“I liked them because they were adults and they thought I was an adult.
I was one of them,” he answered. “I was participating in a conversation.
They took me seriously. No one ever took me seriously—not you, not my
teachers, no one. If I expressed an opinion, you thought I was just a
dumbass kid trying to find my voice. I already had my voice.”13
Caulfield recognized this scenario: “It’s almost traditional grooming in
the sense that the big thing they had with the son is that the community, he
felt, took him seriously. And he felt that his other communities, including
his parents, didn’t. And even though that’s about a thirteen-year-old, I think
it’s also very similar to why a lot of adults gravitate to these communities.
“It’s not all just racism and threats and so forth. A lot of it is they have a
desire for some kind of stature, and they’re not going to make that stature
by saying something that everyone else is saying. And they’re not going to
get that stature in a community that consists of millions of people versus a
smaller community where they can be a quicker superstar.”
The motivating dynamics of conspiracy theorists all vary widely, but
these core motivations tend to arise out of commonly held beliefs and views
that have been distorted and misshapen by the false information and
sociopathic worldview innate to conspiracism. There are, of course, many
other ways to feel heroic and appreciated than to join extremist
organizations, and getting people to change course may require being
imaginative about finding other ways of making them feel valued.
The narratives that are the grist of these buried mythologies are usually
gut level in nature: we buy into the myth of heroism on a visceral level. But
those who do find themselves caught in an endless dynamic in which
generating, identifying, defeating, and then eliminating the enemy—which
is the essence of the heroic narrative—becomes their sole preoccupation. As
we have seen, this can have toxic and tragic consequences.

9. Avoid challenging the person’s core underlying beliefs that motivate

his or her embrace of conspiracy—at least initially.

A number of studies of the deradicalization process found that any attempt

to pull a person out of a rabbit hole immediately turned sideways if the
interlocutor challenged any of the core cherished beliefs of the
conspiracist’s worldview.
Sometimes these beliefs reside in the range of normative society—such
as, say, the belief that abortion is murder—and become malignant only
when a range of toxic conspiracy theories is adopted to support them. At
other times, however, these beliefs originate wholly within the realm of
conspiracists’ alternative universe, such as the belief that Hillary Clinton
presides over a global child slavery and pedophilia ring.
And throughout most of the process of persuading people to draw back
out of their rabbit holes, they clutch these core belief “jewels” tightly and
jealously. Facts that challenge those beliefs, in particular, are not helpful at
this point. Because for the true believers, reality becomes the precipice.
“It’s who you are,” says Kutner. “This really fragile sense of self you’ve
constructed in the movement, it falls apart when it’s challenged like that.
And then you’re back to feeling lost and alone and, ‘My girlfriend left me,’
and ‘Who the fuck am I?’ Most people don’t want to deal with that.”
When she encounters these moments, Kutner says she sees it as an
opportunity to explore those core motives: “For me, I think it’s more, ‘What
are your thoughts on this?’”
Often she can advance the conversation by tossing out published
material from other sources: “Just articles that have a different perspective,”
she says. “‘I was reading this and I haven’t had a chance to talk to many
people who’ve had your experience. What do you think about this?’ And
kind of playing up to their ego, like they’re qualified to speak on the topic.
Especially if they’re guys, because ego plays a central role in so much of
this.”
The world is dominated—though not solely populated—by men. And so
many of the deradicalization efforts have a strong pheromonal scent.
“They’re very aggressively performing masculinity,” Kutner says. “I
think some of them have severe depression that comes with the package.
“With that is that lack of agency,” she adds, referencing one of the key
traits of people drawn to conspiracism. “I talked to a Proud Boy, and I said,
‘Is it kind of like putting on a new suit and seeing if it fits? And if you wear
it long enough, you may not feel as depressed as you were?’
“We agreed that was a big thing—that masking depression through
becoming overly violent or aggressively posturing was a really big deal. I
think that men have a hard time approaching what some healthy level of
masculinity looks like because no one really knows, so they go to
everything that’s been hardwired into society. They take it to the most
extreme route because it’s like, ‘If I feel like a weakling, then if I’m an
alpha male maybe that will compensate for my deficiencies.’”

10. Keep it real and make it genuinely about helping your friend or loved
one. If the person you are attempting to rescue suspects ulterior
motives, you will be sunk.

Samantha Kutner says she works hard to make her interchanges with
radicalized Proud Boys “empowering” but in a healthy direction.
“It would come from a source of empowerment with them,” she says,
adding that groups like the Proud Boys recruit with the same idea in mind:
“I think they’re initially sold on this pitch: ‘You get a chance to be blah,
blah in this organization.’”
She offers them a different, similarly empowering narrative: “I think
that selling them on, ‘You’re an expert in yourself,’ and encouraging self-
reflexivity is key,” she says.
It’s essential, Michael Caulfield says, to gradually move the
conversations into friendlier territory without playing into the process that
led them to conspiracist beliefs in the first place. Making your relationship
with them distinct from that part of their lives is also helpful—and when
drawing them back to the real world, begin asking their advice on matters
and questions that lie wholly outside that realm.
“I think in the process of that, when it’s spotted, and when people both
understand how to not play into the whole process, I think we can have
some effect,” Caulfield says. “And the way that we have that effect is just a
simple conceptual question I would have them ask: ‘I’m not sure this is
what you think it is, but here’s something that you might be interested in.’”
Caulfield says he avoids asking: “Oh, is this trustworthy or not?” “I
actually don’t think that that’s the thing, because when you get into these
things, it’s trustworthy because it supports your thing.”
He says it’s good to challenge them on a rational level on non-core
issues, and best to challenge them on core issues when they show signs of
deepening radicalization: “When someone starts to drift this way, they’ll
post something, maybe their initial post about QAnon,” he says, “or just a
little further along,” he will attempt to steer them away, “saying, ‘Okay, my
source is better than your source, and your source sucks.’
“I think you could say, ‘Hey, I’m not sure if you realize this, but that’s
actually a known white supremacist site’—but then really quickly validate
their concern, find a piece of their concern that you can validate, and say:
‘However, your post did get me interested in some of these issues, and I
found this article from The Atlantic that makes some related points.’
“And that gives that person an out, and they are more likely to withdraw
and say, ‘Okay, some of my feelings and tension about this is not
completely invalidated, but yeah, it looks like I’ve messed up here. And I
didn’t mean to tweet out a white supremacist source.”
Still, it’s important in the process to leave room for their beliefs, even as
you’re getting them to think and behave more rationally.
“I do think that the universes there become just so encased,” he says,
“the way that it is sort of a bubble—not a bubble like it protects us from
things, but like in science fiction: a bubble universe, a little universe that is
internally consistent but exists outside of Earth Prime. They live in a bubble
universe, everything is internally consistent in there, and you can’t pull out
the Seth Rich conspiracy without it unraveling into a million different
issues.”
The sheer mass of this universe can be daunting for anyone dealing with
it. “That’s just harder because their belief system has become so plugged
into these things and so densely interconnected,” Caulfield says. “There’s
such a density to conspiratorial belief. Even more than just belief. You
would think the world is the most densely linked thing, but conspiratorial
belief is just everything links to everything.
“It’s like a game of Jenga at that point. What can you actually pull out
that’s not going to threaten this person’s central identity at this point? That’s
the much more difficult thing.”

11. Take the time to establish real-world activities with the other person
that have nothing to do with politics or conspiracies. Do things, don’t
just talk.
The human experience itself of being on the Internet and its limitations as a
form of human interaction both have a great deal to do with the spread of
conspiracism well beyond merely giving the theories a platform and a
means to circulate widely. Much of it—particularly the ugly trolling
behavior and ultimately the extremist ideologies and violent radicalism that
emerge in the worst corners—reflects the disembodied nature of that
experience and the easy dehumanization that comes along with it.
“Disembodiment and dematerialization are generally assumed to be
intrinsic consequences of digital media because of the implicit
immateriality of digital information and because the user’s interaction with
the media is estranged, or alienated, from instinctual corporeal
authenticity,” observed one study, which then explained that these were
mostly misconceptions.14
However, the otherworldly aspect of being online is part of why it’s
easy to dehumanize other people there: in our online exchanges, it’s just bits
on a screen—there’s no body nearby, no vocal intonation, no eye contact or
expression, no hand gestures, all normal parts of full human
communication. It’s easy to troll someone else. There’s even a thrill
involved.
This environment also enables conspiracism to run unchecked. The
cottage industry that produces most of the world’s conspiracy theories
competes constantly to “push the envelope” of outrage and hysteria, which
are the meat and potatoes of their existence. This means that even vile racial
bigotry comes into play—along with the whole raft of white nationalist and
other forms of extremism.
Personal relationships have difficulty swimming in this environment. So
it’s a great idea to spend shared time away from it. When undertaking the
task of deradicalizing someone, it’s ideal to meet up at least occasionally for
in-real-life activities: coffee, lunch, beers, golf, tennis, movies, pizza,
whatever. Putting a real face and person to all these bits on the screen alters
the dynamic substantially.
If you’re doing this with someone entirely online, this is much more
complicated but still possible. It mostly means agreeing to do things away
from the computer monitors, out in the real world, and then sharing those
things with the other person. You can go see movies, read books, watch TV
shows, whatever works.
 Samantha Kutner likes to have a “literary component” to her exchanges
with far-right extremists. Sometimes this involves reading the same book
and discussing it. Sometimes it involves both sides keeping a journal and
then discussing them afterward.
“I’ve journaled since I was eleven, and I think that that has allowed me
to constantly be willing to evaluate my perspective and really know myself
in that way,” Kutner says. “I think that encouraging self-reflexivity and
having them read, where you’re just exposed to a multitude of different
themes, is essential to this.”
Sometimes the reading would simply entail “articles or summaries of
articles that talk about hate residuals,” she says. “It’s how your brain is
wired in a certain way after being in these organizations. Your neurons
repeatedly fire together, wire together. That’s the statement that they say.
You may be wanting to leave the group, but you may still be in that mindset
where your program or your pattern of thinking has been shaped in this way
that it’s going to take a really long time to unlearn these things.”
She focuses on helping them understand “it’s normal to experience what
they’re experiencing, and they’re not alone in it, reducing shame and
stigma, so that it’s not a process where you have to go it alone, and you can
become an expert in yourself. You can heal from your experience and
whatever it is that can take you out of it.”

12. As the bond builds, opportunities will arise in which to undermine

some of their conspiracism with factuality—though again, this has to
be done gradually and sensitively.

Time is the ally of anyone working to draw conspiracists out of their rabbit
holes, because the more contact they have with someone whom they
previously thought of as a hapless pawn or a corporate sellout, a potential
plotter or some other stereotype used to dismiss doubters, has turned out to
be someone who values them and what they think. Eventually, this may
lead them to rethink these perceptions, though not always.
Samantha Kutner was an egghead academic when most of her subjects
met her. Initially they were hostile and skeptical but, over time, came to see
her as a friend. What worked? “I think prolonged contact with them and
showing them that I’m not an angry feminist, antifa, SJW individual, and
I’m listening to them,” she answers. “I don’t think these men were listened
to like that in their lives. I think that was a really powerful thing.
“I wasn’t passive. If they were wrong in something, I’d say, ‘Here’s
how I understand it, but here’s how most people see this.’ I was always
trying to get them to kind of reconcile the two different things. I think for
those two Proud Boys, that was really important because they were
confronting all of these discrepancies between what they thought the group
was and what the group actually is. They were doing it in a kind of safe
environment where they know that I’m not going to dox them, and I’m not
out to get them, and they could confide in me. I think that helped a lot with
those two members that left.”
What never works, as Michael Caulfield advises, is shaming them—
though he believes public shaming of high-profile figures or participants in
violent behavior can be very effective in changing people’s behavior. “But
for your friends and family, what’s the alternative?” he asks rhetorically.
“You have their relationship with them, and it’s the only bargaining chip
you have, it’s the only thing that you’ve got. And if you make them make a
choice between that and you, I’m just not sure what that does for the
relationship.”
A rhetorical strategy that can be effective at this stage is to find
narratives that neutralize and potentially can replace the older narratives
around which they have constructed their worldview—particularly the
visceral, gut-level narratives that are so appealing to them. Drawing
someone enmeshed, for instance, in QAnon conspiracy theories away from
those beliefs is always helped by nudging reminders, delivered
nonthreateningly, that the billionaire president really did not have the best
interests of ordinary people in mind.
“We have a lot of data showing that if you want people to give up on
misinformation, you have to provide them with an alternative that explains
the noise,” says Stephan Lewandowsky. “‘Why is it that you shouldn’t
believe climate deniers?’ ‘Well, they’re funded by Exxon,’ is what they’re
going to say. That is a thing that is clearly doable and works for some
people.
“At most, people do not want to fall victim to a con man so if you can
convince them that they have been taken advantage of or victimized, then
that might turn them against the con man. However, in practice, that doesn’t
always work because people, once they become vested in something, are
reluctant to admit that they’ve been fooled. They don’t want to be fooled.
So you have to somehow provide that alternative narrative without
emphasizing the fact that they’ve been fooled themselves. It should be more
like, ‘Look at all these people out there who are exploiting vulnerable
people with their nonsense—surely you wouldn’t fall for that type of stuff.’
Or, ‘This guy is victimizing you, I want to help you get out of this hole that
he’s pulled you into.’”

13. Over time, your relationship with the other person will become
important enough to them that they will become more open to your
perspective and more willing to reconsider theirs.

Peter Neumann has seen how difficult it can be to deradicalize someone.

“We know this from a lot of European far-right extremists—you have to get
them out in a way that, first of all, understands that if you’ve been involved
in a particular extremist milieu or in conspiracy—like if you’ve been a 9/11
truther for the past ten years—a lot of your social relationships, both online
and offline, will be based on that theory. Maybe you even got married to
someone because you met him or her in the context of these ideas. So this is
about deconstructing social relationships as much as it is about convincing
them that they were wrong.
“And then, of course, . . . if you’ve dedicated ten years of your life
towards promoting these ideas, you become very invested, and it’s hard for
anyone—nevermind an extremist, it’s hard for anyone—to admit that they
basically wasted ten years of their life on something that is completely
untrue. So, in providing them with a new framework, you also have to make
sure that, as absurd as that sounds, you respect what they’ve done and that
they don’t feel like their entire life has been completely wasted.
“So, you have to allow them to embrace something new without
necessarily making them feel bad or without basically telling them that they
are complete losers who’ve been hooked to a lie, and you have to channel
that into something else. That’s why quite a few extremists who
deradicalize then become very vigorous advocates of deradicalizing other
extremists, because this is a new project that they can channel their energies
into and where their own involvement and extremism is actually something
that’s valuable because they understand it, so they can say, ‘Well, I’ve not
wasted these five years. They’re actually useful for me, because I now
understand how these people work.’”

14. Keep multiplying. Once they begin emerging from the rabbit hole,
help them to reconnect with their personal world—restoring old
relationships that have been ruptured—as well as to expand their
world by getting new experiences that may undermine some of their
bigoted or paranoid beliefs.

Samantha Kutner has found that helping her interlocutors actually come
face to face with some of the people they have demonized in their
conspiracist’s imagination has a powerful effect.
“I would really focus on having them come into contact with the groups
and the people that they’ve demonized in a controlled, safe setting,” she
says. “And having them see that the idea of whoever it is, whether it’s a
Jewish person or a black person or a Hispanic person, the idea that they’ve
been sold about these groups of people is not true; these stereotypes are lies.
“I think the contact hypothesis would be a really good approach to the
reflective, literary component. There would be self-work. There would be
outreach for people who were former extremists, and then there would be
people who don’t fit that mold that they’ve been conditioned to believe. It
would involve speaking to them and just saying, ‘Look, this is my life.’
Spend a few hours with me, and this is what I do.” People, after all, tend to
shed their horns and pitchforks after a cup of coffee with them.

15. Help them to heal. That must be the abiding principle behind every
one of these steps.

The baseline of this kind of undertaking is fixing something that has been
broken. Conspiracy theories break people. They break relationships,
families, communities, nations. They can be overcome only by human
healing and compassion backed by moral and ethical clarity, the antithesis
of the sociopathic world they engender.
The success of the process may hinge on the extent to which you and
the person you’re helping can interact in the real world. That’s Peter
Neumann’s advice, at least.
“They say of course the Internet offers opportunities to find people that
perhaps you wouldn’t interact with normally, but I think the aim should
then be to have an off-ramp where you pull it back into face-to-face
conversation,” he says. “I mean, a conversation can start on the Internet,
and if someone is willing to engage with you, that’s great, but I think
ultimately the solution needs to be face-to-face.
“And that’s why a lot of people are currently talking about this
combination, on and off, looking for people online, trying to figure out who
is potentially open to engaging, who has doubts and questions, but the
endgame is always to engage with them face-to-face and to have facility
that basically allows them to get real help and solve the problem that they
have.”

________

The work of saving the world from a descent into the madness of
conspiracism need not, of course, fall entirely on the shoulders of the
friends and family members of the people who fall into its snares. They
may turn out to be the most effective tool, but government, business, and
society at large have critical roles to play as well.
Peter Neumann’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at
King’s College, London, studied the problem of American online
radicalization in depth as early as 2013 and published a comprehensive
overview of how authorities can tackle it.
The first step: reducing the supply of extremist content. But that comes
with a major caveat.
“First comes the recognition that—for constitutional, political, and
practical reasons—it is impossible to remove all violent extremist material
from the Internet and that most efforts aimed at reducing the supply of
violent extremist content on the Internet are costly and counterproductive,”
it explains at the outset.15
 Next: reducing the demand. These measures would work, “for example,
by discrediting, countering, and confronting extremist narratives or by
educating young people to question the messages they see online.”
Finally: exploiting the Internet. Making practical use of online content
and interactions for the purpose of gathering information, gaining
intelligence, and pursuing investigations is essential for preventing violence
and terrorism.
Neumann and his team explain that the steps involved in reducing the
supply of the content are limited, particularly in the United States because
of its constitutional free speech protections, in which censorship is
extremely circumscribed. In European nations, nationwide filters and legal
restrictions may affect the spread of extremist material in nations where
laws exist prohibiting it, but that won’t affect American consumers to any
appreciable extent. Indeed, “most of the traditional means for reducing the
supply of violent extremist content would be entirely ineffective or of very
limited use in the U.S. context,” the study explains.
The most viable option in the United States would involve commercial
takedowns of extremist material from the platforms where they fester, such
as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Those companies have, since early
2019, begun making serious efforts at removing extremist content from
their platforms, though with mixed results.
“One practical option could be for government agencies to create and,
where appropriate, strengthen informal partnerships with Internet
companies whose platforms have been used by violent extremists,” the
study suggests. “The objective would be to assist their takedown teams—
through training, monthly updates, and briefings—in understanding national
security threats as well as trends and patterns in terrorist propaganda and
communication. As a result, online platforms such as Facebook and Google
would become more conscious of emerging threats, key individuals, and
organizations and could align their takedown efforts with national security
priorities.”
Reducing demand for extremist and terrorist material online is a much
more complicated proposition. Neumann’s study focuses on “activating the
marketplace of ideas”—that is, conducting outreach in the very spaces
where the radicalism is growing. It notes that chief among the drawbacks to
engaging people online is the decided “enthusiasm gap”: “Instead of having
extremist views drowned out by opposing views, the Internet has amplified
extremists’ voices.” The strategy is also hampered by significant gaps in the
pluralism of ideas, as well as major gaps in skill level.
More promising, it suggests, would be measures aimed at “creating
awareness” in a way that was effective and “building capacity in order to
assure that alternative voices are heard.” Countermessaging—which would
expose people to messages that are specifically designed to counter the
appeal of extremism—can also work, but it too has limitations when
coming from officials or authorities. For such campaigns to really work,
they have to be fueled and propagated at the grassroots level by ordinary
people.
The study also discusses ways that the Internet can be an effective tool
for gathering intelligence on political extremists, because so many of them
organize online. It can also be used by investigators in collecting evidence
of crimes afterward.
However, the centerpiece of the study was its finding that promoting
digital-media literacy was the “most long-term—yet potentially most
important—means of reducing the demand for online extremism.”
“In recent years, educators and policymakers have recognized the
unique risks and challenges posed by the Internet,” the study notes. “Most
efforts have focused on protecting children from predators and pedophiles,
with the result that—in practically every school—kids are now being taught
to avoid giving out personal details and to be suspicious of people in chat
rooms. Little, however, has been done to educate young people about
violent extremist and terrorist propaganda.”
Neumann says that families and friends still hold the keys for
preventing radicalization, because they see the effects in real life, while
others are seeing it online. Often, red-pilled young men are hiding those
activities, but their alienation and increasing anger levels also become
manifest in their daily workaday and family lives.
“We know that in terrorism cases, for example, when people radicalize,
we know that a lot of extremists who may be very deep in their extremist
worlds still have so-called bystanders—that is, they have friends, family,
people around them, colleagues at school, but most importantly family who
still have an influence on them.”
Many of these people express shock at the person’s radicalization
afterward, but many also acknowledge that they saw warning signs. And
even after they had fully immersed themselves in their extremist world and
embraced Nazism or Islamic State or whatever end the radicalization led to,
they would maintain their ties to these bystanders.
“So, even people who went to Syria to join ISIS, we’ve observed a lot
of them, they would still WhatsApp with their mom, because they were
missing them, and because for them, their father or their mother was still a
figure out of authority, not in all cases, but in some cases they were,”
Neumann said. “So, that’s why a lot of these programs, these countering
violent extremism programs are about empowering mothers, empowering
parents, etcetera.
“So, I do think that people should take an interest and should be
cognizant when suddenly one of their friends or their kids starts saying
weird stuff and gets into something that is really problematic, because they
all talk about it; we know about this. It’s not like they’re keeping quiet
about it, especially in the early phase when you discover a new paradigm
that explains a lot of things that you thought the government was keeping
secret. You’re very missionary, you’re talking about it all the time, and I do
think that so-called bystanders, family, friends, people at school should pay
attention to that.
“Because it’s exactly at that point that you can still intervene and that
you still have influence and you can still talk someone out of it or you can
engage with them, which at a later point may be much, much more difficult.
So, it is really important to pay attention to this and to be ready to engage in
a discussion about it for people who are connected to them, at an early
point.”

________

The question any investigative reporter worth his or her salt looking at the
twisted world of conspiracy theories and its globally toxic effects on every
level of society would ask is: who benefits?
Who stands to gain, monetarily and in power, from a phenomenon in
which large numbers of people form communities built around non-facts
and nonsense that inevitably crumble in fits of extremist rancor and
fiduciary miscreancy and, in the process, cut themselves off from their
communities and from the political process? Who gains when millions of
people dismiss democracy as a delusional joke and abandon what political
franchise they possess? Who gains when democracy is debilitated,
undermined, hollowed out from within?
Authoritarians do. Certainly authoritarians in government who prefer
that every act reflects the instincts of the revered leader atop the heap
because they believe that will produce a well-ordered society that also
makes them wealthy. But also particularly authoritarians who run
corporations that prefer operating without the constraints imposed by
democratic government, particularly health, labor, and employment
regulations, as well as environmental and work-place safety rules. These are
the people who stand to benefit when a democratic society defenestrates
itself, unlinks its arms from each other, retreating into survivalist bomb
shelters to await the apocalypse or the civil war, whichever comes first.
The world, in truth, has always had a kind of unapologetic conspiracy
operating in the open in every nation, under every form of government:
namely, the conspiracy of established authority, entrenched wealth, and
traditional cultural centers to maintain their positions and enhance and
expand them if possible. “He who has the gold, rules” as a cynical but
realistic version of the Golden Rule is not a new joke.
Conspiracy theories, sociologist Chip Berlet has long argued, are a kind
of wedge between ordinary people and reality whose whole purpose is to
distract the public’s attention from the very real conspiracy happening
before their faces.
“Conspiracism is neither a healthy expression of skepticism nor a valid
form of criticism; rather it is a belief system that refuses to obey the rules of
logic,” he explains. “These theories operate from a pre-existing premise of a
conspiracy based upon careless collection of facts and flawed assumptions.
What constitutes ‘proof’ for a conspiracist is often more accurately
described as circumstance, rumor, and hearsay; and the allegations often use
the tools of fear—dualism, demonization, scapegoating, and aggressively
apocalyptic stories—which all too often are commandeered by
demagogues.
“Thus conspiracism must be confronted as a flawed analytical model,
rather than a legitimate mode of criticism of inequitable systems, structures,
and institutions of power. Conspiracism is nearly always a distraction from
the work of uprooting hierarchies of unfair power and privilege.”16
“Conspiracy is really a tool of power,” observes Michael Caulfield, who
notes that in recent years, academic discourse about conspiracy theories has
wandered into discussions of “who gets labeled a conspiracy theorist and
who doesn’t.
“From my point of view, it’s been interesting to see that hit the wall of
Internet reality, where we’re looking at this massification of conspiracy
theory,” he says. “Some of that starts to look a little precious in terms of
what we’re looking at, precisely because of the sorts of violent events
which we’re talking about, but I think also because more and more people
are having this experience of watching people drift, bit by bit, deeper and
deeper into these communities.”
Kate Starbird first stumbled upon the machinations of foreign
authoritarians tampering with the world’s media ecosystems when she
scientifically examined the spread of misinformation about Black Lives
Matter and found clear evidence that Russian intelligence operatives were
deliberately sowing racial disharmony on social media. Now, she’s finding
a variety of strands of authoritarianism woven throughout a number of
disinformation campaigns whose data she and her team at University of
Washington have gathered.
She believes these campaigns are effective in large part because of the
environment in which it’s occurring, where more and more people are
adopting strong political identities.
“So if that political identity is strong and we’re very polarized, we’re
more susceptible to disinformation,” she says. “Disinformation targets
political division, and that’s also a place where we seem to be
psychologically susceptible to it as well.”
The work led her to examine Cold War propaganda techniques, where
much of the sponsored disinformation originates. “There are some really
interesting old books on Russian disinformation, particularly the Vladislav
Bitman books,” she says. “In one of them, he talks about how really
partisan political identities are ones that are easily manipulated in different
ways, and they said at the time, the KGB was really focused on targeting
the political left, because that aligned with historically their political
ideologies.
“But they’re saying that there’s no reason that these techniques wouldn’t
also work on the far right, and they’d already seen some instances of this as
well, because they said the vulnerabilities themselves aren’t about ideology.
They’re about being so committed to a political identity that you become
unable to differentiate truth versus familiarity and what you want to
believe.”
More current outbreaks of authoritarianism, such as the far-right regime
of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, provide even more vivid insights into
how the disinformation functions. A recent network disinformation paper
was published out of a study in Manila where researchers from the
University of Leeds interviewed people who were participating in a
government disinformation campaign based on social media, troll accounts
that blamed “drug dealers” and liberal elites for all the nation’s ills. The
result, it found, was a “public sphere filled with information pollution and,
consequently, with toxic incivility and polarization.17
“We’ve been trying to figure out, what’s the intersection between these
populist movements and this disinformation infrastructure,” Starbird says.
“They intersect, but it’s not causal. It seems to be something else. And the
rise of these populist movements all over the world, why do they seem to
intersect?
“They’re authoritarian, because that’s their nature,” she adds, noting
that the populism all seems to be of the right-wing variant. “What we’ve
been seeing in a lot of these recent movements is that the leaders that are
able to take advantage of this are ones that are willing to reflect back at the
movements what they want to hear, which I guess is the basis of how
populism works. It’s grievance based, anti-elite based, which feeds into
conspiracism.
“But they’re able to reflect back some of the nastier parts of mob
behavior, which the Internet enables in all sorts of different ways. Then
these leaders have been able to take advantage of that in different ways.
And you can see the mediascape, the people that have risen in the new
media especially, becoming a media player out of doing the same kind of
thing, echoing back these kinds of things to the crowd. Finally, political
leaders are able to use social media directly to sense what people are talking
about and then reflect it right back at them. So we’re seeing that en masse.”
Formulating an effective response in defense of democracy itself is, in
fact, challenging, in large part because so many people living in those
democracies haven’t recognized that the ground is shifting around them and
the landscape with it.
“The hard thing is, there’s a really complex set of multiple things
happening in concert that are resonating,” Starbird says. “It’s great to
unpack them and understand them, but any one explanation is going to fall
short of being complete, because it’s such a complex system.”
The most essential step in tackling the spread of disinformation and
conspiracism on social media, she says, is “to build things that are
trustworthy. Not just social media, but all sorts of information ecosystems.
Journalism has to figure it out; social media has to figure it out. How do we
make trustworthy information-participation systems? There’s not an easy
answer to that.
“It feels like we’re being overwhelmed by something that we don’t
necessarily have the tools of society to grapple with. That seems to be
resonating in ways very quickly and unexpectedly with political conditions
and information systems and all of these things are resonating in ways that
are just putting us in a really bad place.”
The scenario, she says, reminds her of old film footage from 1940 of the
Tacoma Narrows Bridge in southern Puget Sound, a suspension bridge that
was renowned among drivers for wobbling unsteadily on windy days,
earning it the sobriquet “Galloping Gertie.” Opening on July 1 that year, it
remained up only until November, when a powerful windstorm created such
wild oscillations that the bridge came apart and fell into the Sound. Film
footage showing the bridge structure warping wildly before its collapse
became iconic in the Pacific Northwest.
“Galloping Gertie—I feel like that’s what’s happening,” she says. “It’s
just hitting us one way and something else is hitting us a different way. It’s
hitting this resonance, and it’s out of control.
“What is it going to take to cut it? Maybe that keeps going until
everything just gets shattered to pieces, or maybe we just figure out how to
get out of that loop, and we can resolve some of it.”

________

We know what taking the so-called “red pill” looks like. If we could devise
a “blue pill,” what would happen? What would it do to you? To what would
you “awaken”?

First and foremost, it would be about embracing the clear cold light of
reality: the workaday world of “normies,” based on normative
evidence, facts, logic, and reason, one filled with ordinary people
doing ordinary things, dispelling the web of dark conspiracism with
which the red-pilled cocoon themselves.
The complexity of modern life would be seen clearly for what it is: a
vast web that is connected not at some crude and imaginary dot-to-dot
scheme overseen by a nefarious plot, but by the ordinary human
connections every person makes in their daily lives—infinitely more
complex, infinitely more real, and infinitely beyond any scheme that
any radio show host can cook up for gullible audiences.
You would enjoy facts—the ones established through the reliable
sources you enjoy seeking out now. Facts, however, would no longer
be based on your sources’ conjecture, but on objectively reliable
information from well-grounded, verifiable authorities. Science would
cease to be a liberal conspiracy.
Human decency and compassion would cease to be discarded as a
liability; we would develop an awareness of how conspiracism
destroys relationships, harms innocent people, and, at the horrifying
violent end of its funnel, produces death.
Media consumption would return to the workaday world. That
wouldn’t mean that you suddenly decide to accept every word
published in the New York Times or uttered on CNN as unvarnished
truth. Rather, you would again clearly see the complex and difficult
reality: that corporate ownership has distorted our information diet,
that the mainstream media can produce correct and valuable
information, yet it weaves distortions and falsehoods and omissions
into its coverage in ways that require constant vigilance by consumers.
You would cease suspecting that the motives of everyone in your
world are connected under the umbrella of a mind-controlling
conspiracy and realize that the complex ordinary world is run on
billions of individual human motivations, some of them malign, most
of them benign and very . . . human.
Media consumption habits would be affected by the shift in your
perceptions of media contents. Toxic places like 4chan and Infowars
would lose their appeal, largely because their viciousness and
estrangement from factual truth will have lost their appeal. Mainstream
media would still, however, be nearly as problematic as it was before
—just without the obscuring layer of accusa-tory hysteria with which
 their broadcasts are viewed through the prism of the conspiracist
worldview.
The blue pill would eventually induce a kind of mindful empathy or
rational compassion, open-minded but not naïve. As you resume
relationships with family and connect with old and new friends and
expand your horizons to include human generosity, you’ll find it
increasingly easier to be at relative ease in the world wherever you are
and whomever you are with. Like, you know, a normie.
It would fix what’s broken. But not right away. The pill works
gradually. It takes time, forbearance, love, patience, compassion. All
those old-fashioned words come together in one great and real thing:
healing.

It’s what we all need right now.

NOTES
Prologue
1. See Robert Evans, “The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of
Terror,” Bellingcat, August 4, 2019. See also Eliza Mackintosh and
Gianluca Mezzofiore, “How the Extreme-Right Gamified Terror,” CNN,
October 10, 2019.
2. See “The Extremist Medicine Cabinet: A Guide to Online ‘Pills,’”
Anti-Defamation League, November 6, 2019.
3. See Colette Weeks, “Community Remembers Chuck Davis as
Leader, Friend to All,” Skagit Valley Herald, July 23, 2017, 1B.
4. See Joseph Bernstein, “Alt-Right Troll to Father Killer: The
Unraveling of Lane Davis,” Buzzfeed, July 18, 2018. Bernstein assembled
many of Davis’s biographical details used here, in conjunction with the
author’s own research.
5. See David Neiwert, “Alt-Righter ‘Seattle4Truth’ Charged with
Killing Father over Conspiracy Theories,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty
Law Center), October 23, 2017.
6. See Joseph Bernstein, “Top Conservative Writer Is a Group Effort,
Sources Say,” Buzzfeed, March 31, 2016.
7. See David Neiwert, “‘Pizzagate’ Theories Inspire D.C. Gunman, but
Still Have Defenders in Powerful Places,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty
Law Center), December 6, 2016.
8. See Davis’s YouTube video, “Progressive Ideology’s Deep Ties to
Pedophilia,” April 29, 2017, as well as his older video, “Progress:
Pedophilia,” September 12, 2015. Davis’s YouTube account containing all
of these videos remains active.
Chapter 1
1. See, for example, Nelson Blackstock, COINTELPRO: The FBI’s
Secret War on Political Freedom (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1988).
2. See Philip Shenon with Stephen Engelberg, “Eight Important Days
in November: Unraveling the Iran-Contra Affair,” New York Times, July 5,
1987.
3. See, for example, David Neiwert, “‘Communist Takeover’ Paranoia
Gets a Final Resuscitation for Trump’s Inauguration,” January 17, 2017,
Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law Center), and “Far-Right Conspiracists
Stir Up Hysteria about Nonexistent ‘Civil War’ Plot by ‘Antifa,’”
November 14, 2017, Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law Center).
4. See, for example, Duncan Campbell and Ben Aris, “How Bush’s
Grandfather Helped Hitler’s Rise to Power,” Guardian, September 25,
2004.
5. See Herbert Parmet, “What Should We Make of the Charge Linking
the Bush Family Fortune to Nazism?” History News Network, November
17, 2003.
6. See, for example, Joe Conason, “What’s Bush Hiding from 9/11
Commission?” The Observer, January 26, 2004; also see Thomas Bonsell,
“Blame the Leadership Failures,” Seattle PI, October 7, 2004.
7. See “Kissinger Resigns as Head of 9/11 Commission,” CNN,
December 13, 2002.
8. See Timothy J. Burger, “9/11 Commission Funding Woes,” Time,
March 26, 2003.
9. See Philip Shenon, “9/11 Commission Says It Needs More Time to
Complete Report,” New York Times, January 28, 2004.
10. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States,
“The System Was Blinking Red,” The 9/11 Commission Report: Final
Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United
States, 254–66. See also Kurt Eichenwald, “The Bush White House Was
Deaf to 9/11 Warnings,” New York Times, September 10, 2012.
11. See Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People
Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 19–41.
 12. Muirhead and Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 3.
13. See Chip Berlet, “Holocaust Museum Shooting, Antisemitic
Conspiracy Theories, and the Tools of Fear,” Huffington Post, July 11,
2009.
14. See Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, “Dynamics of Bigotry,”
Political Research Associates, November 8, 2000.
15. See Chip Berlet, “Dynamics of Right-Wing Populism,” Research for
Progress, August 15, 2016.
16. See Berlet, “Holocaust Museum Shooting.”
Chapter 2
1. See Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, American Terrorist: Timothy
McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: Regan Books,
2001), esp. 118–58.
2. See David Neiwert, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in
the Age of Trump (New York: Verso, 2017), 49–74.
3. Much of this analysis is based on material provided by former
Department of Homeland Security analyst Daryl Johnson.
4. See “Stephen Paddock: Adam Le Fevre Tells of His Time with the
Las Vegas Shooter,” News Corp Australia Network, October 6, 2017.
5. See Dave Phillips, “Father’s History Could Offer Insight into Mind
of Las Vegas Gunman,” New York Times, October 13, 2017.
6. See Itay Hod, “‘Math Whiz,’ ‘Loner,’ ‘Invisible’: Vegas Shooter’s
Friends Say He Grew Up ‘at the Bottom of the Bottom,’” The Wrap,
October 26, 2017, and Greg Palast, “I Went to School with the Vegas
Shooter,” GregPalast.com, October 13, 2017.
7. See Doug Poppa, “Stephen Paddock’s Brother Eric Called Law
Enforcement Dumb Mother*****, Said He and Paddock Were Smarter
Than Most,” Baltimore Post-Examiner, October 19, 2018.
8. See Mark Berman, Sandhya Somashekhar, William Wan, and Matt
Zapotosky, “Las Vegas Shooting Motive Eludes Investigators as New
Details Emerge about Gunman Stephen Paddock,” Washington Post,
October 5, 2017.
9. See Joshua Robertson and David Smith, “Las Vegas Shooter
Recalled as Intelligent Gambler Well-Versed on Gun Rights,” Guardian,
October 4, 2017.
10. See Christal Hayes, “Las Vegas Gunman Was a Trump Supporter,
Happy with the President Because Stock Market Was Doing Well,”
Newsweek, November 3, 2017.
11. See Chris Pleasance, “‘I Was Born Bad’: Las Vegas Prostitute Who
Romped with Mass Killer Stephen Paddock Says He Enjoyed Violent Rape
Fantasies as She Reveals He Boasted He Had Always Been Evil,” Daily
Mail, October 8, 2017.
 12. See Christal Hayes, “Las Vegas Shooting Motive: Gunman Was
Narcissistic, Became Depressed after Losing ‘Significant Amount of
Wealth,’” Newsweek, November 2, 2017.
13. See Pleasance, “‘I Was Born Bad.’”
14. See Jason Wilson, “New Documents Suggest Las Vegas Shooter
Was Conspiracy Theorist—What We Know,” Guardian, May 19, 2018.
15. See Wilson, “New Documents Suggest Las Vegas Shooter Was
Conspiracy Theorist.”
16. See Wilson, “New Documents Suggest Las Vegas Shooter Was
Conspiracy Theorist.”
17. See Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, The Silent Brotherhood: Inside
America’s Racist Underground (New York: Free Press, 1989), 68–69.
18. See Michel and Herbeck, American Terrorist, esp. 118–58.
19. See Henry Schuster with Charles Stone, Hunting Eric Rudolph: An
Insider’s Account of the Five-Year Search for the Olympic Bombing Suspect
(New York: Berkley Books, 2005).
20. See Richard Orange, “Anders Behring Breivik’s Mother
‘Sexualised’ Him When He Was Four,” Daily Telegraph, October 7, 2012.
21. See “Breivik Planned Tagging as a Military Operation,” Dagbladet,
April 2, 2012.
22. See “Anders Behring Gives Evidence,” Guardian, April 17, 2012.
23. See Matthew Taylor, “Norway Gunman Claims He Had Nine-Year
Plan to Finance Attacks,” Guardian, July 25, 2011.
24. See “The Terrorist and the Arsonists,” Der Spiegel, January 8, 2012.
25. See Arlid Aspoy, “The Silence of the Shooters,” Dagbladet, August
29, 2011.
26. Breivik’s manifesto is available online as a PDF at a site for
researchers.
27. See also Samuel Moyn, “The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme Is 100
Years Old,” New York Times, November 13, 2018.
28. See Bill Berkowitz, “‘Cultural Marxism’ Catching On,” Intelligence
Report (Southern Poverty Law Center), August 15, 2003.
29. See Claudio Corredetti, “The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory,”
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015.
30. See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry:
Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Dialectic of Enlightenment (1940).
 31. See Martin Jay, “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt
School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe,” Salmagundi Magazine, 2011.
32. See Louis Menand, “How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined
Humanity,” New Yorker, August 19, 2019.
33. See Bill Berkowitz, “‘Cultural Marxism’ Catching On,” Intelligence
Report (Southern Poverty Law Center), August 15, 2003.
34. See Paul Gottfried, “Yes Virginia [Dare], There Is a ‘Cultural
Marxism,’” VDare, October 15, 2011.
35. See Jacob Siegel, “The Alt-Right’s Jewish Godfather,” Tablet
Magazine, November 29, 2016.
36. See Chip Berlet, “Into the Mainstream,” Intelligence Report
(Southern Poverty Law Center), August 15, 2003.
37. See William S. Lind, “What Is Cultural Marxism,” Free Congress
Foundation, 1999; see also Bill Lind, “The Origins of Political
Correctness,” Accuracy in Academia, February 5, 2000.
38. See “Ally of Christian Right Heavyweight Paul Weyrich Addresses
Holocaust Denial Conference,” Intelligence Report (Southern Poverty Law
Center), September 20, 2002.
39. See Paul M. Weyrich, “Letter to Conservatives,” Free Congress
Foundation, February 16, 1999.
40. See “1992 Republican National Convention Speech,” Patrick J.
Buchanan, August 17, 1992.
41. See Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying
Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001). See also “Citing Neo-Nazi and Racist
Sources, Buchanan Sounds the Alarm,” Intelligence Report (Southern
Poverty Law Center), June 18, 2002.
42. See “Roger Pearson,” Hatewatch profile (Southern Poverty Law
Center).
43. See Jared Taylor, “Cultural Marxism as Censorship,” YouTube,
October 9, 2014.
44. See Kevin MacDonald, “Kevin MacDonald on Cultural Marxism,”
YouTube, September 10, 2010.
45. See Stephen Baskerville, “The Criminalization of Masculinity,”
Occidental Observer, November 18, 2018.
46. See Lydia Brimelow, “Cultural Marxism in Action: Media Matters
Engineers Cancellation of VDARE.com Conference,” VDare, January 24,
2017.
47. See David Neiwert, “‘Cultural Marxism’: A History of a Far-Right
Anti-Semitic Hoax,” YouTube, January 22, 2019.
48. See Scott Oliver, “Unwrapping the ‘Cultural Marxism’ Nonsense
the Alt-Right Loves,” Vice, February 23, 2017.
49. See David Neiwert, “‘Cultural Marxism’: A History of a Far-Right
Anti-Semitic Hoax,” YouTube, January 22, 2019.
50. See Anders Breivik, “2083—A European Declaration of
Independence,” July 2011.
51. See David Neiwert, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in
the Age of Trump (New York: Verso, 2017).
52. See Keegan Hankes and Alex Amend, “The Alt-Right Is Killing
People,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law Center), February 5, 2018.
53. See Bill Morlin, “Unrepentant and Radicalized Online: A Look at
the Trial of Dylann Roof,” Hatewatch, December 19, 2016.
54. See Katie Zavadski, “Dylann Roof’s Racist Manifesto Is Chilling,”
Daily Beast, July 12, 2017.
55. See Morlin, “Unrepentant and Radicalized Online.”
56. See Josh Glasstetter, “Elliot Rodger, Isla Vista Shooting Suspect,
Posted Racist Messages on Misogynistic Website,” Hatewatch (Southern
Poverty Law Center), May 24, 2014.
57. See Josh Glasstetter, “Shooting Suspect Elliot Rodger’s
Misogynistic Posts Point to Motive,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law
Center), May 24, 2014.
58. See Glasstetter, “Elliot Rodger, Isla Vista Shooting Suspect, Posted
Racist Messages on Misogynistic Website.”
59. See Glasstetter, “Shooting Suspect Elliot Rodger’s Misogynistic
Posts Point to Motive.”
60. See “Elliot Rodger, Isla Vista Shooting Suspect, Posted
Misogynistic Video before Attack,” YouTube, May 24, 2014.
61. See “Alek Minassian Toronto Van Attack Suspect Praised ‘Incel’
Killer,” BBC News, April 25, 2018.
62. See Katharine Laidlaw, “The Man Behind the Yonge Street Van
Attack,” Toronto Life, April 22, 2019.
63. See Richard Hartley-Parkinson, “Virgin Van Driver ‘Killed 10
People Because He Was Sexually Frustrated,’” Metro UK News, September
27, 2019.
 64. See Amy Dempsey, “Inside the Life of Alek Minassian, the Toronto
Van Rampage Suspect No One Thought Capable of Murder,” Hamilton
Spectator, May 14, 2018.
65. See Carli Brosseau and Alan Brettman, “Jeremy Christian’s Path
from Troubled Youth to TriMet Stabbing Suspect,” Oregonian, June 11,
2017.
66. See Nicole Chavez, “Accused Portland Stabber Reveals Himself—
in His Own Words,” CNN, June 7, 2017.
67. See Carli Brosseau and Allan Brettman, “Jeremy Christian’s Path
from Troubled Youth to TriMet Stabbing Suspect,” Oregonian, June 11,
2017.
68. See Aimee Green, “What Defenses Could MAX Stabbing Suspect
Jeremy Christian Possibly Mount?” Oregonian, May 25, 2018.
69. See Lizzy Acker, “Who Is Jeremy Christian? Facebook Shows a
Man with Nebulous Political Affiliations Who Hated Circumcision and
Hillary Clinton,” Oregonian, May 30, 2017.
70. See Brosseau and Brettman, “Jeremy Christian’s Path from
Troubled Youth to TriMet Stabbing Suspect.”
71. See Doug Brown, “Suspect in Portland Hate Crime Murders Is a
Known White Supremacist,” Portland Mercury, May 27, 2017.
72. See “Jeremy Christian Marches with Patriot Prayer, Is Asked to
Leave: 4-29-17,” YouTube, October 1, 2019.
73. See Shane Dixon Kavanaugh, “Watch: MAX Stabbing Survivor Met
Suspect at Portland Protest a Month before Attack,” Oregonian, October
25, 2017.
74. See Conrad Wilson and Amelia Templeton, “Portland Woman
Attacked Day before Fatal MAX Stabbings Says Police, TriMet Failed
Her,” Oregon Public Broadcasting, August 18, 2017.
75. See Kate Williams, “Video: Portland MAX Stabbing Suspect Made
Racial Threats Hours before Slayings,” Oregonian, January 9, 2019.
76. See Will Sommer, “Qanon-Believing Proud Boy Accused of
Murdering ‘Lizard’ Brother with Sword,” Daily Beast, January 9, 2019.
Wolfe’s Washington State Militia profile remained online through 2019.
77. King County Prosecutor, “Findings of Fact Conclusion of Law Re:
Competency,” Case No. 19-1-01395-4 SEA.
78. See Sommer, “Qanon-Believing Proud Boy Accused of Murdering
‘Lizard’ Brother with Sword.”
 79. See Andy Campbell, “Proud Boy Allegedly Murders Brother with a
Sword Thinking He’s Killing a Lizard,” Huffington Post, January 9, 2019.
80. See Sommer, “Qanon-Believing Proud Boy Accused of Murdering
‘Lizard’ Brother with Sword.”
81. See “Buckey Wolfe: Five Facts You Need to Know,” Heavy, January
9, 2019.
82. See Sarah Keoghan and Laura Chung, “From Local Gym Trainer to
Mosque Shooting: Alleged Christchurch Shooter’s Upbringing in Grafton,”
Sydney Morning Herald, March 15, 2019.
83. See Michael Workman, Stephen Hutcheon, and Pat McGrath,
“Christchurch Shooter Brenton Tarrant Was a Personal Trainer in Grafton,”
Australia Broadcasting Corporation, April 4, 2019.
84. See Jovana Gec, “New Zealand Gunman Entranced with Ottoman
Sites in Europe,” Associated Press, March 16, 2019.
85. See Kim Sengupta, “Brenton Tarrant: Suspected New Zealand
Attacker ‘Met Extreme Right-Wing Groups’ during Europe Visit,
According to Security Sources,” Independent, March 15, 2019.
86. See Victoria Ward, “Brenton Tarrant: The ‘Ordinary White Man’
Turned Mass Murderer,” Telegraph, March 20, 2019.
87. See “Who Is Christchurch Mosque Shooting Accused? Brenton
Tarrant Member of Bruce Rifle Club in Milton,” New Zealand Herald,
March 16, 2019.
Chapter 3
1. See “LVMPD Preliminary Investigative Report 1 October/Mass
Casualty Shooting Event: 171001-3519,” Las Vegas Metropolitan Police
Department, January 18, 2018.
2. The following section is taken from an interview with a survivor of
the massacre. The individual’s name has been changed to protect his or her
anonymity.
3. See “LVMPD Preliminary Investigative Report 1 October/Mass
Casualty Shooting Event: 171001-3519.”
4. See “Worker Warned Hotel before Las Vegas Shooter Opened Fire
on Crowd,” CBS News, October 11, 2017.
5. See Rachel Crosby, “Sheriff Says More Than 1,100 Rounds Fired in
Las Vegas Shooting,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, November 22, 2017.
6. See “LVMPD Preliminary Investigative Report 1 October/Mass
Casualty Shooting Event: 171001-3519.”
7. See Gerrit De Vynk, “Google Displayed Fake News in Wake of Las
Vegas Shooting,” Bloomberg News, October 2, 2017.
8. See Bethania Palma, “Did a Second Gunman Shoot from the Fourth
Floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel?” Snopes.com, October 3, 2017.
9. See Kevin Roose, “After Las Vegas Shooting, Fake News Regains
Its Megaphone,” New York Times, October 2, 2017.
10. See Saranac Hale Spencer, “No Evidence Linking Vegas Shooter to
Antifa,” Fact-Check.org, October 5, 2017.
11. See David Neiwert, “In Wake of Las Vegas Massacre, Alex Jones
Claims ‘Democrats Are Going to Be Killing People,’” Orcinus, October 5,
2017.
12. See also “In Wake of Las Vegas Massacre, Alex Jones Claims
‘Democrats Are Going to Be Killing People,’” YouTube, October 4, 2017.
13. See Sam Levin, “‘I Hope Someone Truly Shoots You’: Online
Conspiracy Theorists Harass Vegas Victims,” Guardian, October 26, 2017.
14. See Levin, “‘I Hope Someone Truly Shoots You’: Online
Conspiracy Theorists Harass Vegas Victims.”
15. See Jorge L. Ortiz, “Las Vegas Sheriff: Investigation into Mass
Shooting Shows No Conspiracy or Second Gunman,” USA Today, August
3, 2018.
16. See “Norway Camp Shooting: ‘As Many as 30 Dead,’” Sky News,
July 23, 2011.
17. See Helen Pid, “Anders Behring Breivik Planned to Film Beheading
of Former Prime Minister,” Guardian, April 19, 2012.
18. See Elisa Mala and J. David Goodman, “Big Blast Hits Government
Buildings in Central Oslo,” New York Times, July 23, 2011.
19. See “Norway Attacks: The Victims,” BBC News, March 15, 2016.
20. See “Survivors in Norway Describe Scenes of Terror,” National
Public Radio, July 23, 2011.
21. See Ross Lydall, “Mother of Two Shot Dead for Trying to Stop
Norway Gunman,” London Evening Standard, July 26, 2011.
22. See “Several Young People Shot and Killed on Utøya,” NRK News,
July 22, 2011.
23. See “Survivors in Norway Describe Scenes of Terror,” National
Public Radio, July 23, 2011.
24. See Rune Thomas Ege, Tor-Erling Thommet Ruud, and Jarle
Brenna, “Doctor: Breivik Used Special Ammunition,” VG Net, July 24,
2011.
25. See Aage Borchgrevink and Guy Puzey, A Norwegian Tragedy:
Anders Behring Breivik and the Massacre on Utøya (London: Polity, 2013),
230–34.
26. Borchgrevink and Puzey, A Norwegian Tragedy, 236–37.
27. See “Dylann Roof Almost Backed Out because Parishioners Were
‘So Nice,’” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 19, 2015.
28. See Matthew Weaver, “Charleston Shooting: State Senator
Clementa Pinckney among Victims,” Guardian, June 18, 2015.
29. See Melissa Boughton, “Bishops Bring Together Congregation in
North Charleston to Address Police Shootings,” Post and Courier
(Charleston, SC), June 3, 2015.
30. See Nick Corasaniti, Richard Pérez-Peña, and Lizette Alvarez,
“Church Massacre Suspect Held as Charleston Grieves,” New York Times,
June 18, 2015.
31. See Wayne Drash, “Inside the Bible Study Massacre: A Mom ‘Laid
in Her Son’s Blood,’” CNN, December 17, 2015.
32. See Jeremy Borden, Sari Horwitz, and Jerry Markon, “Officials:
Suspect in Church Slayings Unrepentant Amid Outcry over Racial Hatred,”
Washington Post, June 19, 2015.
33. See Shelby Lin Erdman and Greg Botelho, “Timeline: A Killer’s
Rampage through a California College Town,” CNN, May 27, 2014. See
also Oren Dorrell and William M. Welch, “Police Identify Calif. Shooting
Suspect as Elliot Rodger,” USA Today, May 24, 2014.
34. See “Isla Vista Mass Murder—May 23, 2014—Investigative
Summary,” Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, February 18, 2015.
35. See Ian Lovett and Adam Nagourney, “Video Rant, Then Deadly
Rampage in California Town,” New York Times, May 24, 2014.
36. See “Thwarted in His Plan, California Gunman Improvised,” CBS
News, May 25, 2014.
37. See Bryan Passifume, Kevin Connor, and Jane Stevenson, “10
Dead, 15 Wounded when Van Hits Pedestrians near Yonge and Finch,”
Toronto Sun, April 23, 2018.
38. See Rob Crilly, Christopher Guly, and Mark Molloy, “What Do We
Know about Alek Minassian, Arrested after Toronto Van Attack?”
Telegraph, April 25, 2018.
39. See “‘Nobody’s Seen Anything Like This’: 10 Dead, 15 Injured in
North Toronto Van Ramming Attack,” CBC News, April 23, 2015.
40. See Tu Thanh Ha, Jeff Grayqueen, and Molly Hayes, “Massive
Investigation into Toronto Van Attack Will Shut Down Yonge Street for
Days,” Globe and Mail, April 23, 2018.
41. See Shane Dixon Kavanaugh, “Muslim Teen Targeted before MAX
Train Slaying: ‘Our Faces Were a Trigger,’” Oregonian, August 15, 2018.
42. See Maxine Bernstein, “Portland MAX Hero’s Last Words: ‘Tell
Everyone on This Train I Love Them,’” Oregonian, May 29, 2017.
43. See Bernstein, “Portland MAX Hero’s Last Words: ‘Tell Everyone
on This Train I Love Them.”
44. See Ralph Ellis, Eliott C. McLaughlin, and Madison Park, “Portland
Stabbing Suspect Yells in Court: Free Speech or Die,” CNN, May 31, 2017.
45. See Sara Jean Green, “‘God Told Me He Was a Lizard’: Seattle Man
Accused of Killing His Brother with a Sword,” Seattle Times, January 8,
2019.
46. See Linzi Sheldon, “Seattle Man Jailed, Accused of Killing Brother
with Sword,” KIRO-TV News, January 7, 2019.
47. King County Prosecutor, “Findings of Fact Conclusion of Law Re:
Competency,” Case No. 19-1-01395-4 SEA.
 48. See the Elders, “Buckey Wolfe Was Never a Proud Boy,” Proud Boy
Magazine, January 9, 2019.
49. See Will Sommer, “Qanon-Believing Proud Boy Accused of
Murdering ‘Lizard’ Brother with Sword,” Daily Beast, January 9, 2019.
Wolfe’s Washington State Militia profile remained online through 2019.
50. See “Christchurch Mosque Shootings: Gunman Livestreamed 17
Minutes of Shooting Terror,” New Zealand Herald, March 15, 2019.
51. See Will Sommer and Kelly Weill, “New Zealand Suspect Mixed
Death and Disinformation,” Daily Beast, March 15, 2019.
52. See “‘Hello, Brother’: Muslim Worshipper’s ‘Last Words’ to
Gunman,” Al Jazeera, March 15, 2019.
53. See “Christchurch Mosque Shootings: Gunman Livestreamed 17
Minutes of Shooting Terror.”
54. See Breanna Barraclough, “Christchurch Mass Shootings: Police
‘Strongly Urge’ Social Media Users Not to Share ‘Disturbing’ Video,”
Newshub New Zealand, March 15, 2019.
55. See Sommer and Weill, “New Zealand Suspect Mixed Death and
Disinformation.”
56. See “Man Who Scared Away Gunman at Christchurch Mosque
Hailed a Hero,” Stuff NZ, March 18, 2019.
57. See Joshua Berlinger and Hilary Whiteman, “New Zealand Terror
Suspect Planned Third Attack, Police Chief Says,” CNN, March 20, 2019.
58. See “Christchurch Shooting Death Toll Rises to 50 after One More
Victim Discovered at Mosque,” Australia Broadcasting Corporation, March
16, 2019. See also “Christchurch Mosque Shootings: Gunman
Livestreamed 17 Minutes of Shooting Terror.”
Chapter 4
1. See “Conspiracists Hype ‘Jade Helm’ Theory of Yet Another
Imminent Martial Law Coup,” YouTube, April 28, 2015.
2. See Bill Morlin, “U.S. Military ‘Jade Helm’ Training Plan Draws
Fears from the Antigovernment Right,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law
Center), May 4, 2015.
3. See “Conspiracists Hype ‘Jade Helm’ Theory of Yet Another
Imminent Martial Law Coup,” 3:20.
4. See “Conspiracists Hype ‘Jade Helm’ Theory of Yet Another
Imminent Martial Law Coup,” 5:40.
5. See “Conspiracists Hype ‘Jade Helm’ Theory of Yet Another
Imminent Martial Law Coup,” 7:20.
6. See “Conspiracists Hype ‘Jade Helm’ Theory of Yet Another
Imminent Martial Law Coup,” 10:20.
7. See Representative Louie Gohmert, “Gohmert Statement on Jade
Helm Exercises,” press release, May 5, 2015.
8. See Dylan Baddour, “Ted Cruz, GOP Weigh in on Jade Helm—but
Are They Playing to the Alarmists?” Houston Chronicle, May 6, 2015.
9. See Justin Miller, “How Greg Abbott Got Played by the Russians
during His Jade Helm Freakout,” Texas Observer, May 3, 2018.
10. See Bill Morlin, “Military Training Exercise Jade Helm
Precipitating Fallout,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law Center), August
5, 2015.
11. See Dan Lamothe, “Remember Jade Helm 15, the Controversial
Military Exercise? It’s Over,” Washington Post, September 14, 2015.
12. See Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From
Ancient Times to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006),
56.
13. See Ruth Shuster, “This Day in Jewish History 1189: Richard I Is
Crowned and London’s Jews Are Massacred,” Haaretz, September 4, 2013.
14. See E. M. Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of
the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015).
 15. See Emmy Stark Zitter, “Anti-Semitism in Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s
Tale,’” The Chaucer Review 25, no. 4 (spring 1991): 277–84.
16. See Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 478–79.
17. See John Pollock, The Popish Plot: A Study in the History of the
Reign of Charles II (1905; repr., Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing,
2006); see also John Kenyon, The Popish Plot (London: Phoenix Books,
2001).
18. See Terry Melanson, Perfectibilists: The 18th Century Bavarian
Order of the Illuminati (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2009).
19. See Lindsay Porter, Who Are the Illuminati? Exploring the Myth of
the Secret Society (London: Pavilion Books, 2005).
20. See Massimo Introvigne, “Angels & Demons from the Book to the
Movie FAQ: Do the Illuminati Really Exist?” Center for Studies on New
Religions, January 28, 2011.
21. See J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of Secret Societies (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 128–29.
22. See Amos Hofman, “Opinion, Illusion, and the Illusion of Opinion:
Barruel’s Theory of Conspiracy,” Eighteenth Century Studies 27, no. 1
(1993): 28.
23. See Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 113.
24. See David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt
against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 88.
25. See Graeme Garrard, Counter Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth
Century to the Present (London: Routledge, 2006).
26. See Ray A. Billington, “Anti-Catholic Propaganda and the Home
Missionary Movement, 1800–1860,” The Mississippi Valley Historical
Review 22, no. 3 (December 1935): 361–84.
27. See Terry Golway, “Return of the Know-Nothings,” America: The
National Catholic Weekly, March 29, 2004.
28. See Amanda Beyer-Purvis, “The Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844:
Contest over the Rights of Citizens,” Pennsylvania History 83 (summer
2016): 366–93. See also William E. Gienapp, “Nativism and the Creation of
a Republican Majority in the North before the Civil War,” Journal of
American History 72, no. 3 (December 1985): 529–59.
 29. See Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know
Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992).
30. See Tim Yang, “The Malleable Yet Undying Nature of the Yellow
Peril,” Dartmouth College (February 19, 2004).
31. See Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the
Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1998), 111.
32. Thomas Magee, “China’s Menace to the World,” Pioneer Laundry
Workers Assembly, Knights of Labor, Washington, DC, 1878. The Library
of Congress.
33. See Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese
Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), 3–25.
34. See Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 76.
35. See Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance (New York: Harper, 1909).
36. See Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 70–71.
37. See “Rejoices at the Fall of Schmitz in ’Frisco: Says Jap Trouble Is
Only Labor Question, Will Not Tolerate Invasion of California Even if It Is
Peaceful,” Boston Herald, June 16, 1907.
38. See “Asiatic Coolie Invasion,” flyer, Official Organ of the State and
Local Building Trades Councils of California, San Francisco, April 21, 28,
and May 5, 1906. Available online at Virtual Museum of the City of San
Francisco.
39. See Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 25–26.
40. See Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 263.
41. See Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat against
White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 303.
42. See Roger Daniels, Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in
World War II (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 112.
43. See David Neiwert, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a
Japanese American Community (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005),
110.
44. See Neiwert, Strawberry Days, 110.
45. See Neiwert, Strawberry Days, 104–7.
 46. See Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of
Civilians, Personal Justice Denied (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1997), 6 (my italics).
47. See Hadassa Ben-Itto, The Lie That Wouldn’t Die: The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion (New York: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005); see also
Binjamin Segel, A Lie and a Libel: The History of the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).
48. See Anti-Defamation League, “Hoax of Hate: The Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Zion”; see also Robert A. Rosenbaum, Waking to
Danger: Americans and Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 (New York: Greenwood
Press, 2010), 41.
49. See Randall L. Bytwerk, “Believing in ‘Inner Truth’: The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion in Nazi Propaganda, 1933–1945,” Holocaust and
Genocide Studies 29, no. 2 (fall 2015): 212–29.
50. See David Neiwert, “Anti-Semitism Illustrated: David Duke
Working on New ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’” Hatewatch (Southern
Poverty Law Center), May 20, 2014; see also Mike Dash, Borderlands: The
Ultimate Exploration of the Unknown (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press,
2000), 131–32.
51. See Ted Bloecher, “Report on the UFO Wave of 1947,” National
Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, 1967.
52. See Nigel Watson, “Out of This World: 60 Years of Flying Saucers,”
Wired, June 24, 2007; see also Jerome Clark, The UFO Book: Encyclopedia
of the Extraterrestrial (Detroit: Visible Ink, 1998).
53. See, for example, Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation
into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston, 1986); Gerald D. McKnight, Breach of Trust: How the Warren
Commission Failed the Nation and Why (Lawrence: University of Kansas
Press, 2005); and Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment (New York: Thunder’s
Mouth Press, 1992).
54. See Milton William Cooper, Behold a Pale Horse (Flagstaff, AZ:
Light Technology Publishing, 1991).
55. See Mark Jacobson, “The Granddaddy of American Conspiracy
Theorists,” Rolling Stone, August 22, 2018.
56. See Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria,
1919–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955).
 57. See Kenneth D. Ackerman, Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare,
and the Assault on Civil Liberties (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007).
58. See Landon R. Y. Storrs, “McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare,”
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, July 2, 2015. See also
History.com Editors, “Red Scare,” History.com.
59. See Albert Fried, McCarthyism, the Great American Red Scare: A
Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 40–62;
see also Albert Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 119–20.
60. See Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and
the Senate (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 11.
61. See Griffith, The Politics of Fear, 263.
62. See Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television,
McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2005), 207.
63. See Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of
Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press,
2002), 62–99.
64. See William F. Buckley, “Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and
Me,” Commentary, March 2008.
65. See Benjamin R. Epstein and Arnold Forster, The Radical Right:
Report on the John Birch Society and Its Allies (New York: Vintage Books,
1966), 18–19.
66. See Dion Leffler, “Fluoride Fight Has Long Roots, Passionate
Advocates,” Wichita (KS) Eagle, August 5, 2014; see also William Heisel,
“Does Fluoride Have Lessons for the Vaccine Debate?” Center for Health
Journalism, November 11, 2016.
67. See Gerald E. Markle, James C. Petersen, and Morton O.
Wagenfeld, “Notes from the Cancer Underground: Participation in the
Laetrile Movement,” Social Science & Medicine 12 (January 1978): 31–37.
See also Richard D. Lyons, “Rightists Are Linked to Laetrile’s Lobby,”
New York Times, July 5, 1977.
68. See Paul Feldman, “Conspiracy Talk a U.S. Tradition,” Los Angeles
Times, May 29, 1995; see also John Færseth, “Militias and Conspiracy
Culture,” Hate Speech International, December 23, 2013.
Chapter 5
1. See David Neiwert, In God’s Country: The Patriot Movement and
the Pacific Northwest (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1999),
26–29.
2. See Neiwert, In God’s Country, 27–28.
3. See Neiwert, In God’s Country, 69–86.
4. See Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White
Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 399–402.
5. See Daniel Levitas, The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement
and the Radical Right (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2002), esp. 278–80 and
302–34. See also Neiwert, In God’s Country, 30 and 69–87.
6. See Alexander Zaitchik, “Meet Alex Jones,” Rolling Stone, March
2, 2011.
7. See Carey Dunne, “My Month with the Chemtrail Conspiracy
Theorists,” Guardian, May 22, 2017.
8. See Alex Jones, “Alex Jones Gay Frog Press Conference: Big
Pharma Chemicals Creating Homosexual Biosphere,” Infowars, March 17,
2017.
9. See Matt Novak, “Remember That Time Alex Jones Tried to Start a
Y2K Riot?” Gizmodo, July 16, 2015.
10. See Novak, “Remember That Time Alex Jones Tried to Start a Y2K
Riot?”
11. See Joe Hagan, “A Strange Man Is Following You,” New York
Magazine, April 4, 2011.
12. See Alexander Zaitchik, “Meet Alex Jones,” Rolling Stone, March
2, 2011.
13. See Beau Hodai, “Alex Jones and the Informational Vacuum,”
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, February 1, 2011.
14. See Nate Blakeslee, “Alex Jones Is about to Explode,” Texas
Monthly, January 20,2013.
15. See Tyler Bridges, The Rise of David Duke (Oxford: University
Press of Mississippi, 1994), 67.
 16. See Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White
Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 34–35.
17. See David Neiwert, And Hell Followed with Her: Crossing the Dark
Side of the American Border (New York: Nation Books, 2013), 24–26.
18. See Kathleen R. Arnold, American Immigration after 1996: The
Shifting Ground of Political Inclusion (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2011), 75. Also see “The Nativists,” Intelligence Report
(Southern Poverty Law Center), November 2, 2006.
19. See “Anti-Immigration Groups,” Intelligence Report (Southern
Poverty Law Center), March 21, 2001. Also see Kathleen Arnold, editor,
Anti-Immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia (Santa
Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2011), 34.
20. See Casey Sanchez, “Glenn Spencer, More Hateful by the Day,
Drones On,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law Center), January 14, 2009.
21. See Bob Moser, “Arizona Extremists Start Anti-Immigrant Citizen
Militias,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law Center), April 15, 2003.
22. See “Paramilitary Compound Goes to SPLC Clients,” Hatewatch
(Southern Poverty Law Center), January 27, 2006; see also “Immigrants
Win Arizona Ranch,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law Center), August
19, 2005.
23. Neiwert, And Hell Followed with Her, 44–49.
24. See Susy Buchanan and David Holthouse, “Minuteman Civil
Defense Corps Leader Chris Simcox Has Troubled Past,” Intelligence
Report (Southern Poverty Law Center), January 31, 2006. See also Dennis
Wagner, “Minuteman Leader Found New Calling after 9/11 Attacks,”
Arizona Republic, June 1, 2006.
25. See Nikolaj Vijborg, USA under Attack, 2008.
26. See Neiwert, And Hell Followed with Her, 75–80.
27. See David Holthouse, “Minutemen, Other Anti-Immigrant Militia
Groups Stake Out Arizona Border,” Intelligence Report (Southern Poverty
Law Center), June 27, 2005.
28. See Hal Bernton, Mike Carter, David Heath, and James Neff, “The
Terrorist Within: The Story behind One Man’s Holy War against America,”
Seattle Times, June 23-July 7, 2002.
29. See Neiwert, And Hell Followed with Her, 159–70.
30. See Neiwert, And Hell Followed with Her, 159–72.
 31. See Armando Navarro, The Immigration Crisis: Nativism, Armed
Vigilantism, and the Rise of a Countervailing Movement (Walnut Creek,
CA: Altamira Press, 2009), 125–30, 167; Terry Greene Sterling, Illegal:
Life and Death in Arizona’s Immigration War Zone (Guilford, CT: Lyons
Press, 2010), x–xiii; United States Government Accountability Office,
“GAO-06-770 Illegal Immigration: Border-Crossing Deaths Have Doubled
since 1995,” August 2006; Karl Eschbach, Jacqueline Hagan, and Nestor
Rodriguez, “Causes and Trends in Migrant Deaths along the U.S.-Mexico
Border, 1985–1998,” Center for Immigration Research, University of
Houston, 2001.
32. See Richard Finger, “The Border Fence: Horrible Deal at Cost up to
$40,000 per Illegal Immigrant Apprehended,” Forbes, July 18, 2013.
33. See David Neiwert, “How the Brutal Murders of a Little Girl and
Her Father Doomed the Xenophobic Minuteman Movement,” AlterNet,
July 23, 2012.
34. See David Neiwert, “Simcox’s Child-Molestation Trial Only the
Latest Instance of Minuteman Criminality,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty
Law Center), March 16, 2015.
35. See David Neiwert, “Chris Simcox’s Fall from Minuteman Heights
Ends in 19½-Year Sentence for Molesting Girls,” Hatewatch (Southern
Poverty Law Center), July 13, 2016.
36. See Fox News Chicago, “KKK Warns of Death Threat against
Obama,” May 21, 2007. See also Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok, “Silver
Lining: Not All White Supremacists Oppose Black President,” Intelligence
Report (Southern Poverty Law Center), August 29, 2008.
37. See David Neiwert, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in
the Age of Trump (New York: Verso, 2017), 96–97. See also Amy
Hollyfield, “For True Disbelievers, the Facts Are Just Not Enough,” Tampa
Bay Times, June 28, 2008.
38. See Andy Barr, “Roger Stone Claims Michelle Obama ‘Whitey’
Video Will Soon Surface,” The Hill, June 2, 2008.
39. David Weigel, “Change They Can Litigate: The Fringe Movement
to Keep Barack Obama from Becoming President,” Slate, December 4,
2008; Jess Henig with Joe Miller, “Born in the U.S.A.: The Truth about
Obama’s Birth Certificate,” FactCheck.org, August 21, 2008.
40. See Jeff Bercovici, “Who Is Alex Jones, Anyway? Five Fun
Factoids,” Forbes, January 9, 2013. See also Alexander Zaitchik, “Meet
Alex Jones,” Rolling Stone, March 2, 2011.
41. See Neiwert, Alt-America, 109–36.
42. See David Neiwert, “‘We Are at War’: How Militias, Racists and
Anti-Semites Found a Home in the Tea Party,” AlterNet.org, November 21,
2010.
43. See Neiwert, Alt-America, 149–53.
44. See “Active Antigovernment Groups in the United States,” Southern
Poverty Law Center. Also see Mark Potok, “Rage on the Right,”
Intelligence Report (Southern Poverty Law Center), March 2, 2010.
45. See Daniel Schulman and Rachel Morris, “Meet the Birthers: Who
Are These People, Really?” Mother Jones, August 10, 2009. See also David
Neiwert, “Hannity Gleefully Promotes Birther Soldier’s Get-out-of-Service
Scam as Legitimate,” CrooksAndLiars.com, July 16, 2009.
46. See “Trump Claims Obama Birth Certificate ‘Missing,’” CNN,
April 25, 2011; also see Ashley Parker and Steve Eder, “Inside the Six
Weeks Donald Trump Was a Nonstop ‘Birther,’” New York Times, July 2,
2016; also see Alana Abramson, “How Donald Trump Perpetuated the
‘Birther’ Movement for Years,” ABC News, September 15, 2016.
47. See Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns, “Donald Trump’s
Presidential Run Began in an Effort to Gain Stature,” New York Times,
March 12, 2016; see also Adam Gopnik, “Trump and Obama: A Night to
Remember,” New Yorker, September 12, 2015; also see Amy B. Wang, “‘It
Was Fantastic’: Trump Denies 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Spurred Presidential Bid,” Washington Post, February 28, 2017.
48. See Stephen Lemons, “Joe Arpaio Birther Posse Probes President
Obama’s Birth Certificate,” Phoenix New Times, September 19, 2011; also
see Sarah Anne Hughes, “Sheriff Joe Arpaio Tasks ‘Cold Case Posse’ to
Investigate Obama’s Birth Certificate,” Washington Post, September 20,
2011.
49. See Sarah Posner and David Neiwert, “How Trump Took Hate
Groups Mainstream,” Mother Jones, October 14, 2016.
50. See Tim Murphy, “How Donald Trump Became Conspiracy
Theorist in Chief,” Mother Jones, November/December 2016.
51. See Liam Stack, “He Calls Hillary Clinton a ‘Demon.’ Who Is Alex
Jones?” New York Times, October 13, 2016. Also see “Alex Jones Rants
Hysterically That Clinton, Obama Are Actually Demons,” YouTube video,
April 5, 2017.
 52. See Glenn Kessler, “‘Pizzagate’ Rumors Falsely Link Death of Sex-
Worker Advocate to Nonexistent Clinton Probe,” Washington Post,
December 6, 2016.
53. See David Neiwert, “Pizzagate’ Theories Inspire D.C. Gunman, but
Still Have Defenders in Powerful Place,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty
Law Center), December 6, 2016.
54. See David Neiwert, “Conspiracy Meta-Theory ‘the Storm’ Pushes
the ‘Alternative’ Envelope Yet Again,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law
Center), January 17, 2018.
55. See Mark Landler, “What Did President Trump Mean by ‘Calm
before the Storm’?” New York Times, October 6, 2017.
56. See Paris Martineau, “The Storm Is the New Pizzagate—Only
Worse,” New York Magazine, December 19, 2017.
57. See Ben Collins, “NASA Denies That It’s Running a Child Slave
Colony on Mars,” Daily Beast, June 29, 2017.
58. See Neiwert, “Conspiracy Meta-Theory ‘the Storm’ Pushes the
‘Alternative’ Envelope Yet Again.”
59. See Neiwert, “Conspiracy Meta-Theory ‘the Storm’ Pushes the
‘Alternative’ Envelope Yet Again.”
60. See Kyle Mantyla, “Jerome Corsi Has Uncovered Irrefutable Proof
of the Authenticity of ‘QAnon,’” Right Wing Watch, January 11, 2018.
61. See Elizabeth Nolan Brown, “Trump’s Mythical Crackdown on Sex
Trafficking,” Reason, February 27, 2017.
62. See “Interviewing Liz Crokin on the Storm, QAnon, Pedogate, &
Twitter Feuds,” YouTube video, January 2, 2018.
63. See Andrea Park, “Chrissy Teigen and John Legend Threaten to Sue
Conspiracy Theorist over Pedophilia Allegations,” CBS News, January 2,
2018.
64. See “Americans Say Murder More Likely Than Suicide in Epstein
Case,” Rasmussen Reports, August 14, 2019.
65. See “‘Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself’ and the Meme-ing of
Conspiracy,” Wired, November 15, 2019.
66. See Bill Morlin, “Terrorism Suspect Makes Reference to Extremist
Conspiracies,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law Center), July 20, 2018.
67. See Brendan Joel Kelly, “QAnon Conspiracy Increasingly Popular
with Antigovernment Extremists,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law
Center), April 23, 2019.
 68. See David Weigel, “Conspiracy Theorist Shares Oval Office Photo
with Trump,” Washington Post, August 24, 2018.
69. See Jana Winter and Elias Groll, “Here’s the Memo That Blew Up
the NSC,” Foreign Policy, August 10, 2017.
70. See Julie Hirschfield Davis, “White House Aide Forced Out after
Claim of Leftist Conspiracy,” New York Times, August 11, 2017.
71. See James Downie, “This NSC Ex-Staffer’s Memo Is Crazy.
Trump’s Reaction Is More Disturbing,” Washington Post, August 11, 2017.
72. See Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfield Davis, “As Midterm
Vote Nears, Trump Reprises a Favorite Message: Fear Immigrants,” New
York Times, November 1, 2018.
73. See Swathi Shanmugasundaram, “Hate Groups and Extremists
Cheer President Trump as He Vilifies Migrant Caravan,” Hatewatch
(Southern Poverty Law Center), October 25, 2018.
74. See Avery Anapol, “Fox Business Drops Guest Who Blamed
Migrant Caravan on ‘Soros-Occupied State Department,’” The Hill,
October 28, 2018.
75. See “Laura Ingraham Attacks the Media for Not Fearmongering
over the Migrant Caravan,” Media Matters, October 22, 2018.
76. See Megan Keller, “CNN’s Camerota, Matt Schlapp Clash over
Migrant Caravan: Will Migrants ‘Get a Luxury Car?’” The Hill, October 22,
2018.
77. See Donald Trump, October 18, 2018 tweet, 1:04 p.m.
78. See Daniel Politi, “Why Did Synagogue Suspect Believe Migrant
Caravan Is Jewish Conspiracy? Maybe He Watched Fox News,” Slate,
October 27, 2018.
79. See Adam Serwer, “Trump’s Caravan Hysteria Led to This,” The
Atlantic, October 28, 2018.
80. See Ben Collins, “Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting Suspect
Threatened Jewish Groups, Pushed Migrant Caravan Conspiracies,” NBC
News, October 27, 2018.
81. See Rita Katz, “Inside the Online Cesspool of Anti-Semitism That
Housed Robert Bowers,” Politico, October 29, 2018. See also “‘The Jews
Should Count Themselves Lucky’: Extremists React to Pittsburgh
Synagogue Shooting,” Anti-Defamation League, October 27, 2018.
Chapter 6
1. See Belinda Goldsmith, “Is Facebook Envy Making You
Miserable?” Reuters, January 22, 2013.
2. From author’s interview with Kutner.
3. See Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy
Theories (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), v.
4. See Sean Illing, “The Trump-Ukraine Story Shows the Power of
Conspiracy Theories,” Vox, October 1, 2019.
5. See Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy
Theory (New York: HarperCollins, 2013).
6. See Illing, “The Trump-Ukraine Story Shows the Power of
Conspiracy Theories.”
7. See Brotherton, Suspicious Minds, 105–7.
8. See Brotherton, Suspicious Minds, 105–7.
9. See Jennifer A. Whitson and Adam D. Galinsky, “Lacking Control
Increases Illusory Pattern Perception,” Science 322, no. 5898 (October
2008): 115–17.
10. See Joseph E. Uscinski, Conspiracy Theories and the People Who
Believe Them (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 250.
11. See Gwen Snyder, Twitter thread, May 27, 2019.
12. See Uscinski, Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe
Them, 14.
13. See Stephan Lewandowsky, Gilles E. Gignac, and Klaus Oberauer,
“The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection
of Science,” PLoS One 8, no. 10 (October 2, 2013).
14. See Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, Scott
Brophy, Elisabeth A. Lloyd, and Michael Marriott, “Recurrent Fury:
Conspiratorial Discourse in the Blogosphere Triggered by Research on the
Role of Conspiracist Ideation in Climate Denial,” Journal of Social and
Political Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2015).
15. See Michael Wood and Karen M. Douglas, “Conspiracy Theory
Psychology: Individual Differences, Worldviews, and States of Mind,” in
Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them, ed. Joseph E.
Uscinski (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 245–56.
 16. See Brotherton, Suspicious Minds, 110.
17. See Andrew K. Przybylski, Kou Murayama, Cody R. DeHaan, and
Valerie Gladwell, “Motivational, Emotional, and Behavioral Correlates of
Fear of Missing Out,” Computers in Human Behavior 29, no. 4 (July 2013):
1841–8. Also see John M. Grohol, “FOMO Addiction: The Fear of Missing
Out,” Psych Central, July 8, 2018.
18. Author’s interview with Lewandowsky.
19. See Wood and Douglas, “Conspiracy Theory Psychology,” 245–56.
20. See Brotherton, Suspicious Minds, 67.
21. See Illing, “The Trump-Ukraine Story Shows the Power of
Conspiracy Theories.”
22. See A. Cichocka, M. Marchlewska, and A. Golec de Zavala, “Does
Self-Love or Self-Hate Predict Conspiracy Beliefs? Narcissism, Self-
Esteem, and the Endorsement of Conspiracy Theories,” Social
Psychological and Personality Science 7, no. 2 (2016): 157–66.
23. See Kelly Weill, “Christmas Is the Loneliest Time for QAnon Fans,”
Daily Beast, December 23, 2018.
24. See Renee Diresta, “Online Conspiracy Groups Are a Lot Like
Cults,” Wired, November 13, 2018.
25. See Weill, “Christmas Is the Loneliest Time for QAnon Fans.”
26. See Wood and Douglas, “Conspiracy Theory Psychology,” 245–56.
27. See Weill, “Christmas Is the Loneliest Time for QAnon Fans.”
28. See Leanne Naramore, “Sandy Hook Families Are Suing Alex
Jones. This Is What He Said about the Shooting,” Media Matters, April 17,
2018.
29. See Bob Cesca, “Alex Jones Is Actually Dangerous: Why We Have
to Start Taking His Paranoid Worldview Seriously,” Salon, May 15, 2015.
Also see “Mystic Playground Sign Thief Gets Jail Time in Virginia,”
Westerly (RI) Sun, November 30, 2017.
30. See Reeves Wiedeman, “The Sandy Hook Hoax,” New York
Magazine, September 2016. Also see Paula McMahon, “Fired FAU Prof
James Tracy Testifies about Feud with Sandy Hook Victim’s Parents,”
Orlando Sun-Sentinel, December 1, 2017.
31. See Emily Shugerman, “US Shock Jock Alex Jones Sued by Six
More Families of Sandy Hook Victims,” Independent, May 25, 2018. See
also “Infowars’ Alex Jones Blames ‘Psychosis’ for His Sandy Hook Hoax
Claim,” Associated Press, March 30, 2019.
 32. See “Infowars’ Alex Jones Blames ‘Psychosis’ for His Sandy Hook
Hoax Claim.”
33. See Will Sommer, “Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer Fight for
Credit over Vegas Shooting Conspiracy Theory,” Daily Beast, June 27,
2018.
34. See Dan Friedman, “Inside the Crazy and Vicious Feud between
Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi—and Why It Matters,” Mother Jones,
January 31, 2009.
35. See David Neiwert, “Portland Far-Right ‘Patriot’ Street Brawlers in
Disarray as Proud Boys Part Ways amid Violent Talk,” Daily Kos, February
11, 2019.
36. See David Neiwert, “Defiant Alt-Right ‘Patriots’ Encounter
Portland’s Simmering Anger after Train Killings,” Hatewatch (Southern
Poverty Law Center), June 6, 2017.
37. See David Neiwert, “What You Need to Know about Saturday’s
‘Patriot’ Rally in San Francisco,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law
Center), August 25, 2017.
38. See David Neiwert, “Portland Far-Right Rally once Again Quickly
Turns Violent as March Becomes a Riot,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty
Law Center), July 3, 2018.
39. See Neiwert, “Portland Far-Right ‘Patriot’ Street Brawlers in
Disarray as Proud Boys Part Ways amid Violent Talk.”
40. See Neiwert, “Portland Far-Right ‘Patriot’ Street Brawlers in
Disarray as Proud Boys Part Ways amid Violent Talk.”
41. See Illing, “The Trump-Ukraine Story Shows the Power of
Conspiracy Theories.”
42. See Uscinski, Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe
Them, 13.
Chapter 7
1. See Zeynep Tufekci, “We’re Building a Dystopia Just to Make
People Click on Ads,” TED Talk, September 2017.
2. For more on this subject, see Zeynep Tufekci, “It’s the (Democracy-
Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech,” Wired, August 16, 2018.
3. See David Neiwert, “Good Intentions on Extremism at YouTube,
Facebook Hit the Wall of Profitability,” Daily Kos, April 3, 2019.
4. See Mark Bergen, “YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting
Toxic Videos Run Rampant,” Bloomberg News, April 2, 2019.
5. See Alexis Madrigal, “The Reason Conspiracy Videos Work So
Well on You-Tube,” The Atlantic, February 21, 2019.
6. See Jane Coaston, “YouTube, Facebook, and Apple’s Ban on Alex
Jones, Explained,” Vox, August 6, 2018. Also see Neiwert, “Good
Intentions on Extremism at YouTube, Facebook Hit the Wall of
Profitability.”
7. See Timothy Johnson, “Despite Ban, Alex Jones’ Infowars Appears
to be Operating Yet Another Youtube Channel,” Media Matters, March 25,
2019.
8. See Kelly Weill, “How YouTube Built a Radicalization Machine for
the Far-Right,” Daily Beast, December 17, 2018.
9. See Bergen, “YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic
Videos Run Rampant.”
10. See Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search
Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018),
185.
11. See Rebecca Hersher, “What Happened When Dylann Roof Asked
Google for Information about Race?” National Public Radio, January 10,
2017.
12. See Mike Caulfield, “The Curation/Search Radicalization Spiral,”
Hapgood, May 7, 2019. Also see Mike Caulfield, “Info-Environmentalism:
An Introduction,” New Horizons, October 23, 2017.
13. See Noble, Algorithms of Oppression, 116.
14. See Weill, “How YouTube Built a Radicalization Machine for the
Far-Right.”
 15. See Caulfield, “The Curation/Search Radicalization Spiral.”
16. See Peter Neumann, “Options and Strategies for Countering Online
Radicalization in the United States,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 36, no.
6 (2013).
17. See Neumann, “Options and Strategies for Countering Online
Radicalization in the United States.”
18. See Neumann, “Options and Strategies for Countering Online
Radicalization in the United States.”
19. Author’s interview with Caulfield, April 2019.
20. Author’s interview with Caulfield, April 2019.
21. Author’s interview with Caulfield, April 2019.
22. See “Understanding Fake News and Misinformation,” Trends and
Issues in Higher Ed, University of Washington, May 29, 2018.
23. See Kate Starbird, “The Surprising Nuance behind the Russian Troll
Strategy,” Medium, October 20, 2018.
24. See Kate Starbird, “Muddied Waters: Online Disinformation during
Crisis Events,” University of Washington lecture series, Vimeo video, April
18, 2018.
25. See “Understanding Fake News and Misinformation.”
26. See Starbird, “The Surprising Nuance behind the Russian Troll
Strategy.”
27. See Kate Starbird, “Examining the Alternative Media Ecosystem
through the Production of Alternative Narratives of Mass Shooting Events
on Twitter,” International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media,
2017.
28. See Starbird, “Examining the Alternative Media Ecosystem through
the Production of Alternative Narratives of Mass Shooting Events on
Twitter.”
29. Author’s interview with Starbird, April 2019.
30. Author’s interview with Starbird, April 2019.
31. See Michael Edison Hayden, “Neo-Nazi Website Daily Stormer Is
‘Designed to Target Children’ as Young as 11 for Radicalization, Editor
Claims,” Newsweek, January 16, 2018.
32. See Jared Holt, “At AmRen 2018, White Nationalists Boast about
Grooming the Next Generation of Racists,” Right Wing Watch, May 2,
2018.
 33. See J. M. Berger, “Nazis vs. ISIS on Twitter: A Comparative Study
of White Nationalist and ISIS Online Social Media Networks,” George
Washington University Program on Extremism, September 2016.
34. See David Neiwert, “Meet ‘Patriot Front’: Neo-Nazi Network Aims
to Blur Lines with Militiamen, the Alt-Right,” Hatewatch (Southern
Poverty Law Center), December 12, 2017.
35. See Hatewatch Staff, “Donning the Mask: Presenting ‘The Face of
21st Century Fascism,’” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law Center), June
20, 2017.
36. See Lynsi Burton, “Theater Poster-Plastering Latest in String of UW
Nazi Recruitment Propaganda,” Seattle PI, February 16, 2017.
37. See Dan Sullivan, “National Guard ‘Neo-Nazi’ Aimed to Hit Miami
Nuclear Plant, Roommate Says,” Tampa Bay Times, June 14, 2017.
38. See “Vanguard America,” Anti-Defamation League (profile), 2017.
39. See Hatewatch Staff, “Alleged Charlottesville Driver Who Killed
One Rallied with Alt-Right Vanguard America Group,” Hatewatch
(Southern Poverty Law Center), August 13, 2017.
40. See Neiwert, “Meet ‘Patriot Front’: Neo-Nazi Network Aims to
Blur Lines with Militiamen, the Alt-Right.”
41. See Neiwert, “Meet ‘Patriot Front’: Neo-Nazi Network Aims to
Blur Lines with Militiamen, the Alt-Right.”
42. See Neiwert, “Meet ‘Patriot Front’: Neo-Nazi Network Aims to
Blur Lines with Militiamen, the Alt-Right.”
43. See A. C. Thompson, Ali Winston, and Jake Hanrahan, “Inside
Atomwaffen as It Celebrates a Member for Allegedly Killing a Gay Jewish
College Student,” Pro Publica, February 23, 2018.
44. See Robert Evans, “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist
Activists Were ‘Red-Pilled,’” Bellingcat, October 11, 2018.
45. See Evans, “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists
Were ‘Red-Pilled.’”
46. See Evans, “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists
Were ‘Red-Pilled.’”
47. See Evans, “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists
Were ‘Red-Pilled.’”
48. See Evans, “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists
Were ‘Red-Pilled.’”
 49. See Evans, “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists
Were ‘Red-Pilled.’”
50. See Evans, “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists
Were ‘Red-Pilled.’”
51. See Evans, “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists
Were ‘Red-Pilled.’”
52. See David Neiwert, “What the Kek: Explaining the Alt-Right
‘Deity’ behind Their ‘Meme Magic,’” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law
Center), May 9, 2017.
53. See “Kek,” Know Your Meme, January 2014.
54. See Neiwert, “What the Kek: Explaining the Alt-Right ‘Deity’
behind Their ‘Meme Magic.’”
55. See Neiwert, “What the Kek: Explaining the Alt-Right ‘Deity’
behind Their ‘Meme Magic.’”
56. Neiwert, “What the Kek: Explaining the Alt-Right ‘Deity’ behind
Their ‘Meme Magic.’”
57. See Neiwert, “What the Kek: Explaining the Alt-Right ‘Deity’
behind Their ‘Meme Magic.’”
58. See Evans, “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist Activists
Were ‘Red-Pilled.’”
Chapter 8
1. See Zeynep Tufekci, “We’re Building a Dystopia Just to Make
People Click on Ads,” TED Talk, September 2017.
2. See especially Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950).
3. See Robert Altemeyer, The Authoritarians (Ramona, CA: Cherry
Hill Publishing, 2006); and Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler,
Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
4. See Amanda Taub, “The Rise of American Authoritarianism,” Vox,
March 1, 2016.
5. See Altemeyer, The Authoritarians, 27.
6. See Altemeyer, The Authoritarians, 75–95.
7. See Maggie Koerth-Baker, “Why Rational People Buy into
Conspiracy Theories,” New York Times Magazine, May 21, 2013.
8. Sinclair’s quote—“It is difficult to get a man to understand
something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”—can
be found in his book I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
(1935; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 109.
9. See David Neiwert, “The Far Right’s Hate-Spewing Trolls Come
Crawling Out to Celebrate Christchurch Massacre,” Daily Kos, March 26,
2019.
10. See John Wagner, “‘So Ridiculous!’: Trump Accuses the Media of
Trying to Blame Him for New Zealand Shootings,” Washington Post,
March 18, 2019.
11. See Colby Itkowitz and John Wagner, “Trump Says White
Nationalism Is Not a Rising Threat after New Zealand Attacks: ‘It’s a Small
Group of People,’” Washington Post, March 15, 2019.
12. See Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, Social Dominance: An
Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
13. See Bart Duriez and Alain Van Hiel, “The March of Modern
Fascism: A Comparison of Social Dominance Orientation and
Authoritarianism,” Personality and Individual Differences 32, no. 7 (2002):
1199–1213.
14. See Jordan Peterson, “The Gulag Archipelago: A New Foreword by
Jordan B. Peterson,” in The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksander
Solzhenitsyn (New York: Penguin Books, 2018).
15. See Samantha K. Stanley, Taciano L. Milfont, Marc S. Wilson, and
Chris G. Sibley, “The Influence of Social Dominance Orientation and
Right-Wing Authoritarianism on Environmentalism: A Five-Year Cross-
Lagged Analysis,” PLoS One, July 10, 2019.
16. Although the quote is frequently attributed to John Steinbeck, it is
not a direct citation of anything he wrote, but rather a paraphrase attributed
to Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (Toronto: House of Anansi
Press, 2004), 124.
17. See Ledyard King, Bill Theobald, Kevin McCoy, Brett Murphy, and
Ali Schmitz, “What We Know about Cesar Sayoc, the Florida Man
Suspected of Mailing More Than a Dozen Bombs,” USA Today, October
26, 2018.
18. See Kevin McCoy, “Pipe Bomb Suspect Cesar Sayoc Pleads Guilty
in Spree Aimed at Trump Critics, Including Obama, Biden,” USA Today,
March 21, 2019.
19. See Chip Berlet, “Heroes Know Which Villains to Kill: How Coded
Rhetoric Incites Scripted Violence,” Research for Progress, January 2014.
20. See Xeni Jardin, “‘MAGA Mail-Bomber’ Cesar Sayoc: Trump Was
‘My New Found Drug’ and I Was Also on Steroids,” Boing Boing, April 23,
2019.
21. See Ayal Feinberg, Regina Branton, and Valerie Martinez-Ebers,
“Counties That Hosted a 2016 Trump Rally Saw a 226 Percent Increase in
Hate Crimes,” Washington Post, March 22, 2019.
22. See Justin Wm. Moyer, “Trump Says Fans Are ‘Very Passionate’
after Hearing One of Them Allegedly Assaulted Hispanic Man,”
Washington Post, August 20, 2015.
23. See Chip Berlet, “Heroes Know Which Villains to Kill: How Coded
Rhetoric Incites Scripted Violence.”
24. See David Neiwert, “The American Right Hankers for a Civil War:
A History in Four Videos,” Daily Kos, February 25, 2019.
25. See Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, “Trump’s N.F.L. Critique
a Calculated Attempt to Shore Up His Base,” New York Times, September
25, 2017.
26. See Inae Oh, “Trump Defends Claim That There Were ‘Very Fine
People on Both Sides’ of White Supremacist Rally,” Mother Jones, April
26, 2019.
27. See David Neiwert, “Christopher Hasson Is Just the Latest Sign of
America’s Rising Far-Right Domestic Terrorist Tide,” Daily Kos, February
21, 2019.
28. See Charles P. Pierce, “A Coast Guard Officer Was Just Found
Plotting to Murder Democrats and Media Personalities ‘On a Scale Rarely
Seen,’” Esquire, February 20, 2019.
29. See Neiwert, “The American Right Hankers for a Civil War: A
History in Four Videos.”
30. See Jason Wilson, “Are Rightwing Pundits Right That America Is
on the Brink of a Civil War?” Guardian, June 22, 2017.
31. See David Neiwert, “‘Communist Takeover’ Paranoia Gets a Final
Resuscitation for Trump’s Inauguration,” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty
Law Center), January 17, 2017.
32. See Abby Ohlheiser, “A Short History of Alex Jones Claiming That
the Left Is about to Start a Second Civil War,” Washington Post, July 3,
2018.
33. See David Neiwert, “Far-Right Conspiracists Stir Up Hysteria about
Nonexistent ‘Civil War’ Plot by ‘Antifa,’” Hatewatch (Southern Poverty
Law Center), November 14, 2017.
34. See “Cohen: Fears No ‘Peaceful Transition’ if Trump Loses in
2020,” Reuters, February 27, 2019.
35. See Libby Nelson, “Donald Trump Just Said He Might Not Concede
the Election if Clinton Wins,” Vox, October 19, 2016.
36. See Chris Cilizza, “Donald Trump Is Setting the Stage to Never
Concede the 2016 Election,” Washington Post, October 14, 2016.
37. See Jenna Johnson, “Donald Trump Says He Will Accept Results of
Election—‘If I Win,’” Washington Post, October 20, 2016.
38. See Jack Shafer, “Trump’s Final Days,” Politico, September 19,
2018.
39. See Aaron Blake, “The Most Ominous Thing Michael Cohen Said
about Trump This Week,” Washington Post, February 28, 2019.
Chapter 9
1. See Robert Jay Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum
Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism (New York:
Henry Holt, 1999), 340.
2. See Joseph Bernstein, “Alt-Right Troll to Father Killer: The
Unraveling of Lane Davis,” BuzzFeed, July 18, 2018.
3. See Joseph Bernstein, “The Unsatisfying Truth about Hateful Online
Rhetoric and Violence,” BuzzFeed, November 24, 2018.
4. See Bernstein, “Alt-Right Troll to Father Killer: The Unraveling of
Lane Davis.”
5. See Bernstein, “The Unsatisfying Truth about Hateful Online
Rhetoric and Violence.”
6. See Bernstein, “The Unsatisfying Truth about Hateful Online
Rhetoric and Violence.”
7. The remainder of this chapter is constructed from advice and insight
provided by a team of experts with backgrounds in extremism,
radicalization, disinformation, and rehabilitation/recovery, to whom I am
eternally grateful for the extensive time they provided through interviews:

Dr. Peter Neumann, founding director of the International Centre for

the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence as well as
professor of security studies at the War Studies Department of King’s
College London.
Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky, chair of cognitive psychology at the
School of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, and a
longtime professor at the University of Western Australia.
Kate Starbird, associate professor in the Department of Human
Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) and director of the
Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation (emCOMP) Laboratory at
the University of Washington. She is also adjunct faculty in the Paul
G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering and the
Information School.
Michael Caulfield, the director of blended and networked learning at
Washington State University–Vancouver.
 Samantha Kutner, a researcher on far-right Proud Boys organizing
with the anti-extremist organization Light upon Light.
C. V. Vitolo, professor of debate at University of Wisconsin–
Madison, an anti-racist activist with a track record of successful
deradicalization.

8. Author’s interview with Peter Neumann, April 2019.

9. Author’s interview with Stephan Lewandowsky, April 2019.
10. Author’s interview with Michael Caulfield, April 2019.
11. See Noah Berlatsky, “The Case against Empathizing with Trump
Supporters,” Medium, May 2, 2019.
12. See especially Carl Rogers, Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current
Practice, Implications, and Theory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951).
13. See Anonymous, “What Happened after My 13-Year-Old Son
Joined the Alt-Right,” Washingtonian, May 5, 2019.
14. See Paol Hergert, “How Tangible Is Cyberspace?” Digital Culturist,
March 15,2017.
15. See Tim Stevens and Peter Neumann, “Countering Online
Radicalisation: A Strategy for Action,” The International Centre for the
Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, December 7, 2017.
16. See Chip Berlet, “Toxic to Democracy: Conspiracy Theories,
Demonization, and Scapegoating,” Political Research Associates, 2009.
17. See Jonathan Corpus Ong and Jason Vincent Cabanes, “Architects
of Networked Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Troll Accounts and
Fake News Production in the Philippines,” Newton Tech4Dev Network,
University of Leeds, 2017.