Content Warning: Mentions of pedophilia, racism, sexual assault, anti-Semitism

Conspiracy theories are endemic to American culture. Ranging from the (mostly) harmless theories about a faked moon landing or gay frogs to the unsettling stories about pizza parlor-based child trafficking, these conspiracy theories shape American public discourse and culture. Not all conspiracy theories are made equally: some are grounded in actual government programs intended to manipulate media or disrupt movements for racial justice, while others are as factual as the Earth is flat. They may be large, determining a person’s entire worldview or political ideology, and they may be small, casually believed as a simple, unspoken fact of the world.

Still, at the heart of every conspiracy theory are conspiracy theorists, the people tirelessly working to make the “truth” known. This group of people are hard to characterize because they are just as diverse as the wide-ranging theories they imbibe. However—despite provocations to do otherwise—many people home in on the most outlandish of conspiracy theories and resort to describing their adherents in victimizing, pathologizing, unsympathetic terms. A prime example is the latest and largest American conspiracy theory, QAnon, which asserts that a Satanic, pedophilic cabal of political elites have taken over the government. In this theory, Q—an anonymous military operative—is distributing coded messages to assist former president Donald Trump in his overthrow of the cabal. Sounds…crazy, right?

“Crazy” might sometimes be an accurate characterization of followers’ beliefs—and maybe even followers themselves—but more often than not, it’s an oversimplified understanding of both what supporters believe and why they believe it. In this brief, interactive version of my undergraduate thesis, we’ll look at how regular people come to believe in QAnon and end up promoting it to a wider audience, before quickly looking at the effects of these dearly held beliefs. So let’s jump in.

Hermeneutics of Online Conspiracy Theory

I believe the point about the whole Q movement is like, ‘This is the information; think for yourself.’ And then if somebody comes to a different conclusion, well then leave them alone.
—Eva, housewife

Over the summer of 2020, I collected data on the lives and works of QAnons, conducting a virtual ethnography,¹ 30 interviews, and performing quantitative content analysis on over 300,000 tweets. I entered my research with two primary questions: (1) how do people come to believe in the political reality of QAnon, and (2) how do people, once involved, assist in the creation of this political reality? In answering these questions, I developed a hermeneutics² of online conspiracy that tracks followers' involvement in QAnon. This hermeneutics describes the processes through which conspiracy theorists generate meaningful political realities grounded in personal experience. In short, followers first adopt constructed conspiratorial identities on the basis of personal grievances, then they work to promote their beliefs by participating in QAnon's massive online presence, doing the interpersonal work to ideologize QAnon, turning it into a set of beliefs and practices that structure and inform their engagement with politics through the lens of a personal narrative.

I made a “crazy” graphic describing this framework that my preceptor would probably rather I didn't include, but this is my presentation, and here it is:

If that's a lot to take in, don't worry. We'll walk through the processes of adoption, promotion, and ideologization in the sections to follow.

¹ This just means that I spent a lot of time online, hanging out with QAnons on Facebook, Twitter, etc. while watching their YouTube videos, TikToks, and livestreams.
² I'm sorry! “Hermeneutics” is a fancy word but it really just means “meaning-making”: how do you interpret things to make meaning? If something happens in your life, and it feels important, and you say “This is a turning point, from here on out I will be more like this,” then you've just interpreted that event to make it meaningful to you!

Adoption

...it comes down to lived experience too, because we're going to be able to give you the best statistics because we lived it, right?
—Samantha, mother, formerly in foster care

At the core of conspiracy belief is identity. Identity, taken as a constellation of biographical traits and experiences, is the medium through which conspiratorial beliefs can be adopted, as identity itself is reconstructed by conspiracy theories. This isn’t to suggest that, for example, all rural White people or undereducated people are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, but that these traits can be leveraged by conspiracy promoters to turn someone’s identity into the basis for conspiratorial thinking. “Whiteness” or “motherhood” themselves become conspiratorial. So, let’s make a QAnon. Select some biographical traits—perhaps ones that correspond to your own background—and we’ll see the kinds of messages conspiracy promoters might send you.

Adoption

Now select some experiences you (or the fake conspiracy theorist you’re constructing) might’ve had.