As someone who tends to get asked a lot about conspiracy theories, the first thing I’ve learned is to not dismiss them outright. If you want to engage someone on conspiracy theories, you have to start from a place of trust.
That doesn’t mean you have to agree with anything, but present yourself as someone who has an open mind. It’s often sometimes of strategic value to simply respond that it’s possible or that you’ll check it out. Anyone who subscribes to these beliefs already has a significant emotional investment in the topic. For all of QAnon’s partisan hatred and thinly veiled anti-Semitic dog whistles, it is also a narrative of child abduction and abuse by people in power. In the minds of QAnon devotees, to dismiss such (far-fetched, unproven) stories out of hand may imply that you’re dismissive of the problem of abuse itself.
The second thing I do is affirm that conspiracies do exist, particularly those involving sexual abuse and child trafficking. In my conversations with Eric, I made repeated references to Watergate and Iran-Contra, two government-level conspiracies that were eventually unmasked, and to the Catholic Church sex abuse scandals.
I referenced the allegations surrounding Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. I talked about movies like Spotlight and All the President’s Men, the recent documentary on Epstein, and The Insider, Michael Mann’s film on the tobacco lobby. On the one hand, I wanted to demonstrate my willingness to entertain conspiracy theories as a topic by referring whenever possible to actual conspiracies. On the other, I wanted to shift the conversation to how actual conspiracies work.
Real-world conspiracies, after all, share any number of commonalities, particularly in how they’re eventually brought to light, and if QAnon has any shred of truth to it, these patterns should also apply here. And so again and again, I find myself saying to believers, “I don’t know if you’re right or wrong, but if you were right, I would expect the following to happen,” referring to any number of established conspiracies whose unmasking all followed a similar pattern. My goal is usually to press the believer’s own recognition of internal contradictions so that the belief itself gets harder to sustain.
I tend to stress how quickly things unravel once they’re first brought to light. The first article by Bob Woodward on Watergate was June 20, 1972, three days after the break-in; Nixon resigned just over two years later. The Globe’s Spotlight story ran on January 6, 2002; Cardinal Bernard Law resigned as head of the Boston archdiocese by the end of that year. Weinstein was charged within eight months of the first stories by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey in the New York Times and Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker. (None of these represent perfect justice, of course, but they indicate how quickly the wheels turn once things are in motion.) Whereas, in conspiratorial formulations, there’s often an exhortation to “stay tuned.” QAnon, like a lot of conspiracy theories, bears with it the endlessly deferred structure of the Rapture.
Once an actual conspiracy is finally revealed, emboldened victims come forward. After the initial reports by the New York Times and the New Yorker, dozens of other actresses came forth and alleged that Weinstein assaulted them. But in the case of the Oklahoma “pedophocracy,” the allegations never triggered a flood of subsequent allegations by other victims despite their contention that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children had been abused. In 30 years, no one else has come forward with similar allegations.
Likewise, QAnon alleges thousands of victims yet has produced none. Timothy Charles Holmseth, a conspiracist who claims to be part of a (nonexistent) Pentagon Pedophile Task Force, alleged in May that this same task force rescued some 35,000 children from an underground network of prisons beneath New York’s Central Park. Set aside the fact that most experts agree that the epidemic of child abduction is significantly inflated to begin with, an even more important question to ask is: Who are these victims, and where are their families? Where are the obituaries, the memorials, the tearful mothers on the steps of the Capitol holding press conferences, demanding justice? “There’s not one of them out there who said, ‘Yeah, we’re glad our child was rescued from this giant underground war,’” Craig Sawyer, an anti-sex-trafficking activist and critic of Holmseth, told the Daily Beast.
When comparing conspiracy theories to their real-world counterparts, what becomes clear is how conspiracists tend to see the world on a fairly abstract level. There is a purposeful lack of detail and specificity since such detail will reveal inherent problems and contradictions with the theory. The more you press for these details, the harder the conspiratorial mind will have to work to reconcile the theory with reality. My goal is always to move the conspiracy theory out of the realm of abstraction and into the concrete: What are the mechanics of this conspiracy, and what is preventing the normal mechanisms of investigative journalism and law enforcement from kicking in here?
After all, conspiracies take work, and the bigger the conspiracy, the more people involved. Carl Bernstein’s first encounter with Judy Hoback Miller, the bookkeeper for the Committee for the Reelection of the President, would later be remembered by both Bernstein and Woodward as the turning point in their investigation. Miller, who would later say she “felt frustrated” that she didn’t think “the truth was coming out,” provided the reporters with crucial information. At a 40th anniversary event of the break-in in 2012, Woodward and Bernstein argued that Miller was more important than Mark “Deep Throat” Felt.
Nixon historian Stanley Kutler called people like Miller the “so-called ‘minor people’” — the secretaries, security guards, and other low-level employees who worked behind the scenes for the big players who were often the first to talk. Such people are rarely ideologues nor are they being paid enough. The complexities of QAnon likewise would require a massive number of such minor people; people who, it stands to reason, have no ideological commitment to such horrors but are nonetheless employed in carrying them out. Such people ought to be easy to get to talk. When no such whistleblowers emerge, it speaks to the thinness of the story.
It’s not just low-level employees. Keeping victims silent also requires leverage. For years, the tobacco lobby successfully used nondisclosure agreements and other legal strategies to stifle leaks. In the case of Weinstein, as well as with the Catholic Church, the conspiracies were kept away from the public for a long time because those figures in power had a specific kind of leverage over their victims: Weinstein could make or break careers; the Church wielded the unique power that spiritual authorities often have over their victims. Other forms of pressure are cruder: The mafia’s spectacular assassinations of would-be stool pigeons display the ultimate leverage. But in all these cases, even with the very real threat of death, people eventually talked.
For an increasingly high-visibility conspiracy like QAnon, silencing whistleblowers or victims would require a kind of leverage that goes beyond all of this. Perhaps such a thing exists, but your average QAnon believer should be made to articulate what it is and how it’s functioned so well for so long. Rather than appeal to mainstream authority like the media or the government, or to simply denounce QAnon or whatever as implausible, it’s far more effective to let a believer do that work themselves by helpfully suggesting all the specifics that they’re coached not to consider. After all, even highly organized conspiracies with limitless government backing and resources can’t stay hidden forever. The CIA’s extraordinary rendition program from the early days of the war on terror was documented by none other than hobbyist plane spotters, who noted the tail numbers of flights taking off and landing. The more wide-reaching a conspiracy — the more victims it has, the more perpetrators involved, the wider geographical distance covered, etc. — the more traces it will leave. A conspiracy theory that is widely hypothesized and yet unproven, in other words, requires a level of human infallibility that we have never heretofore seen.
This is also an important part of the allure of a conspiracy theory — it invites a strange kind of optimism about human agency. There’s something perversely soothing about a conspiracy theory, even one utterly malignant and diabolical, because it presupposes a world without chaos or randomness. Conspiracists believe in these theories because they think they’re true, in part, but also because they find them, on some level, reassuring. And this is perhaps more essential to understand than the actual mechanisms of the conspiracy theory itself because once an idea is providing important moral pleasure, it rarely matters how ludicrous the suppositions are.