United States Senate

• Over those ensuing months, he appeared at a number of protests and marches in Minnesota – demonstrations that conservative politicians and pundits excoriated.
• Four years later, White accepted the endorsement of the Minnesota GOP in the state’s 2024 U.S. Senate race.
• But the reality is far more nuanced, with emerging research finding that there is far more diversity among conspiracists than scholars previously thought.

Entering the margins

• What began as an attempt to understand the QAnon conspiracy movement quickly expanded into an exploration of a wide range of alternative belief systems.
• Most researchers have understood conspiracy theories and alternative beliefs as being a product of poor education or misinformation spread on social media.
• Some of the most privileged people in U.S. society hold deeply conspiratorial beliefs, as do sports fans, yogis and video game enthusiasts.

Forbidden knowledge

• Certain stigmatized narratives can also become tools wielded by politicians and media influencers who will say or do anything to make money and gain power.
• Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of these influencers became popular by suggesting that they had “sacred” or “secret” knowledge on how to defeat the virus.
• Some of these beliefs, like the imaginary continent of Atlantis, were used by the Nazi party to create a link to a mythical pure race.

The complexity of conspiracists

• While many pundits point to white Christian nationalists as the group most susceptible to conspiracies – and there is some truth to this claim – it’s important to pay attention to others who possess conspiratorial ideas.
• The anti-vaccine movement is now a pet issue for many on the right, but it first gained notoriety among wealthy liberals.
• But I found the survey’s other findings somewhat startling – that 8% of self-identified Democrats and 14% of independents also agreed with that statement.

Where do we go from here?

• Namely, they’re united by distrust in mainstream institutions.
• They long for alternative belief systems that confirm their existing beliefs and ignore contradicting evidence.
• In fairness, the number of Americans who believe in conspiracy theories does not seem to be rising.