The Intersection Of Conspiracy Theories And Cultland: A Conversation About QAnon with Nathan Allebach

By Syran Warner

The foundation of Cultland is littered with conspiracy theories. Charles Manson convinced his followers that a "race war" was on its way, and that justified the murders he orchestrated. Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles convinced their followers that a UFO was trailing the Hale-Bopp comet and the only way to get on it was to die.

And while cultists love conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories love cults. Centuries of anti-Semitism can be dated to the "blood libel," a racist lie that imagine a cult or "cabal" of secret, Jewish world domination that fed on literal blood. In the United States, "Satanic Panic" in the 1980s and 1990s was a mob movement to find evidence of ritualistic crimes that never occurred. Read the Wikipedia article titled "Day-care sex-abuse hysteria" to learn more.

It’s true that not all cults have conspiracy theories baked into them just as not all conspiracy theories are cult adjacent. Still, these concepts overlap so often, it seems prudent to investigate.

This is an especially important topic in 2021, a year when a conspiracy theory obsessed cult caused a deadly stir at the US Capitol over the bogus theory that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. QAnon is a cult so pregnant with conspiracy theories it’s curious how its adherents keep track of all of them without refreshing 4chan every few hours.

You might think you know the story of QAnon, as it’s been discussed in the news ad nauseum for the past year, but there have been major flaws in the ink dedicated to the group and few reporters get it right. 

One of them is Nathan Allebach, who decided to cover Q after it seduced some of his loved ones. Nathan dug so deep into conspiracy land he emerged from his research as a premiere expert on the subject. Last year Nathan wrote a colossal history of conspiracy theories in America (you can read it here) and scored a book deal to expand on the subject.

We discussed the ways conspiracy thinking becomes toxic, who is vulnerable, where these theories come from, the media coverage of Q and a host of other topics.

[An interview with QAnon member Melissa Lively comes up a few times in this conversation. To see where that interview ended up check out The Body International’s first feature here.]

Where’s Waldo?

Syran: How long did it take you to write that conspiracy history piece?

Nathan: Oh, geez. I stopped tracking it around 250 hours. I want to say, I don't know, it was probably somewhere around 300 hours, but it's hard to gauge exactly because you're like looking up stuff in the bathroom and, like thinking of stuff in the car.

I don't know, it's hard to track those little moments, but yeah, somewhere around there. I think it was four and a half months. It's pretty much all I did in between jobs was just work on that. So, it wasn't even necessarily the the writing itself, it was more just going through all the primary sources and trying to make sure it was as airtight as I could make it.

It was a good exercise. I have a lot of friends and family that have been into this shit. So, it was helping me and also, giving a resource to people I know going through the same thing.

Nathans article is a hair longer than this interview.

Syran: You just mentioned that you were drawn to it because you had family who got involved in conspiracy theories?

Nathan: Yeah. I've had friends and family into the stuff for a while, but obviously it ramped up with COVID. I was starting to notice it more publicly, specifically on Facebook, some on Twitter, just people I know posting very openly about whether it was a plandemic.

And it was Fall of Cabal, that type of stuff, or just directly like related to QAnon and Pizzagate type content. 

I remember back in 2016, being at one of my buddy's house. We were watching a UFC event together and he brought it up, it was the week that a Pizzagate had originally dropped and he was big into Reddit at the time. We were just sitting at his laptop while the fights were going on, just talking about it. And he's going through all the threads on Reddit, cause it's so crazy and we're just laughing about it and then a little time went on, it was just like, “oh that was this funny thing.”

We didn't take it all that seriously. And him and I actually reconnected just this past summer as this whole thing has been blown up. It was just crazy being like, "Oh that thing that we were just messing around with on the internet, it's now this mainstream conspiracy theory that our friends and family are into."

So that sucks.

Syran: I knew what Pizzagate was, but no, I didn't know what it was. I knew what the story was.

Nathan: I know what you mean.

Syran: And then, years down the line, it was really just [last] spring, right after the pandemic, all these people from my hometown started posting just odd [content on Facebook.] It just seemed odd at first and then I noticed everybody was posting when Save the Children came. It was like everybody was posting the same memes around the same time. It just bothered me, and I started talking to these people about it and got blocked by a bunch of people and I ended up doing some research. For a long time I had just no clue what it was. It was bad statistics, misleading stuff. And then I got into an internet argument with these people that I knew when Q made the news and somebody got upset about it and said, this isn't true.

I shared some easy-to-read article about Q and we got in this huge fight about it. This was with probably five people I went to high school with. Two of them were Republicans and just wanted to join in [the argument] but the two people that were posting this stuff, both admitted to being molested and they were like, "that's why I'm posting all this stuff."

It was the weirdest, oddest thing. And after that I thought, I have to do a story about this bullshit.

QAnon Meme

Nathan: It feels like the acceleration of it from the beginning of the pandemic, to then Save the Children stuff, to then the tech companies starting to enact their censorship approach. It's been so fast, and it's gotten so out of hand so quick. It's really crazy.

Syran: Yeah, just the evolution of 2020. There are so many ways that Q has morphed.

Nathan: Totally. And there are some great reporters and journalists covering this stuff. Thank God, because they're just, it's just such a complex web of intersecting subjects, from like you said Save the Children, like the trafficking stuff, the statistics around that, and then how that kind of tangentially relates to child porn.

And how, like all that then is connected to what these conspiracy theorists call the Deep State and how that relates to the Democrats. You got a combination of politics and culture and religion. It's just like a soup of shit you've got to wade through to understand.

Syran: This Melissa Lively, the woman who was “saved from her mental illness,” who's a phony, I explained to her what was going on in Q from when she left; when the clones got really big and all this other stuff. But of course, she knew that because she was still in these groups. That was even difficult, trying to remember all the different hot topics and when Q started focusing on the election more, or Anons.

Nathan: I forget, where you're saying that email that turns out that she's like still into it or something.

Syran: Yeah.

Nathan: That's so crazy. It's not that surprising either.

Some of the photos Melissa sent after her interview.

Syran: There was a time when I really got into it where I was, maybe paranoid is the wrong word, but I really was just expecting QAnon, because it was growing so fast, that there was just going to be like crazy, real world incidents of individuals doing violent stuff or maybe organizing in a way that they haven't in the past when they've exposed themselves in videos or whatever, we both know the stories, but I don't feel that way anymore. I definitely have lost whatever [fear] that is.

Something that I thought about in your article, which is a weird thought, was thinking about people's obsession with conspiracy theories and the way it changes their thinking.

There's a parallel between that and cults. I thought about like John Hinckley Jr. and his obsession where he shot the president, and he was going to hijack an airplane and kill himself in front of Jodie Foster. He was crazy, but it's the same kind of obsession that I saw in your article that people without real neurosis go down paths where all of a sudden, they're just consuming, and they can't get enough of this thing and it just takes over their lives.

Why do you think that happens with secular ideas? With some conspiracy theories? 

Nathan: I think there's so many formulas, there's so many paths to get to conspiracy theory thinking and paranoia, it's really hard to break down into one avenue. I think the general pattern is that people are going through some type of hardship. They're going through loss of a loved one. Social isolation. Maybe loss of a job, or it could even just be personal issues. Like maybe they just have anxiety or depression or other psychological problems that they've been dealing with. That's usually the baseline.

And then from there it’s tapered with some existential feeling, like a sense that you need meaning or belonging. So, you need a community to give you purpose. A direction to make you feel like you're here for a reason. To me, those are really strong psychological archetypical factors that date back thousands of years. They'd probably go back to really the beginning of humanity and they're things that most people around the world and throughout history, felt in some way, at some point in their lives. I think that's the kind of freaky part about all this is all people carry the same propensity for this thinking.

All it takes is a sort of trigger. You might have, a pre-existing temperament that you're more prone to delusion or anxiety. Or maybe you just think you're super special or you feel powerless in a situation. These are all things that have been tied back in the psychology literature; to being swept up by this stuff. So, it could be something like that. Or you could just be a relatively normal person with no preexisting issues, but then you experience the loss of a job and your wife leaves and you're at home and you have all this time on the computer and you're looking for purpose and friends and you start to just go down the rabbit hole in some of these areas.

I think it's really the baseline human features for meaning and belonging that I think are at the root of what drives people to believe in conspiracy theories, the same reason people look into cults. The same reason they look into self-help measures or pseudoscience or religion.

These are all things that relate back to those kind of fundamental drivers, and that's why I think we're seeing it in such mass amounts right now during the pandemic.

Syran: Mind control tactics are totally real. They're very common in cults. One of my subjects is a psychologist who was in a cult when she was 21 for three years and she described how when she got out, it took three years for her brain to function as it had before. She described all kinds of things like an issue where sometimes she couldn't tell if what was happening was happening right then in the present or if she was in the past. I don't know. I thought that was interesting.

Nathan: That's terrifying.

Syran: This stuff can really fuck with your head where people's thinking really changes. You talked about some things that I wouldn't have thought about as conspiracy theories. And some of them are just small pieces of information. Like when Trump was touting this drug that we didn't know anything about, hydroxychloroquine. How is that a conspiracy?

Not a cure for COVID, it turns out.

Nathan: The way I like to think about conspiracy theories is that they exist on a scale where you have, on one end of the scale you have information in material reality that you can prove, you can touch, you can measure, and that's what's true. And on the other end of the scale, you have these ideas that are completely based in metaphysical reality, that there's no way to prove them. There's no way to disprove them. They're just ideas that people conjure and throw out there.

So, I think most popular conspiracy theories exist somewhere in the middle, but they err to the side of the end of the spectrum and metaphysical reality, obviously, but they're not all equal.

I would say one like that, it kind of errs, like maybe if it's a scale of one to 10, I'd give that a six, because that's information that we don't have data for. There were measurable ways to tell if it worked or not, but not for long enough trials. There wasn't enough research to give it like a yes or no, this works, or this doesn't work, type of answer.

So, when you have the president touting this as essentially a miracle cure it falls in the same vein as what I would consider to be snake oil, essential oils or like colloidal silver or any other type of cure that people tout, which may or may not have some basis [in reality,] whether it's placebo or some kind of fringe studies showing that might help in the areas of A, B or C. But you have people present it like it's this miracle cure-all type of thing. 

That's how I would place that. I wouldn't say that Trump touting hydroxychloroquine as a cure would be a conspiracy theory on the metaphysical level of a QAnon. But it follows the same trail of thinking where you start to base what you think and what you believe in that that grey area where there's an unknown, but you're trying to make an absolute claim in reality on something that you don't know.

Syran: I think when people think of popular conspiracy theories, JFK is the big one, I think JFK's assassination had something to do with the huge explosion of people's thinking changing and getting into groups and radicalizing, because all of the sudden so many people didn't trust the information they were getting from the authority they relied on, but I don't know how dangerous the JFK assassination is on a level that makes people go nuts for it.

Or like the Denver airport, strange situation, but people don't lose their minds and they don't really seem to hurt people. What do you think makes a conspiracy theory dangerous?

Nathan: That’s a great question. I think using that sort of scale of one to 10, where one, we have information based in reality, facts, measurable science, all that, and 10 being the sort of metaphysical, unknowable areas that are just up in the air.

I think what makes something dangerous is when you start to not just entertain the conspiracy theories around, like you use JFK as an example, like JFK's assassination, or let's say a more recent example would be Jeffrey Epstein. I don't think there's anything wrong at all with looking at a suspicious event in history like JFK's assassination or Epstein's death and saying there's a lot of suspicious factors at play here. There's a lot of power at play here. These are things that we should be skeptical of. These are things that we should be mindful of and look into more.

All of those to me are healthy instincts. The problem is that anytime you have in specifically an event, like an assassination, or like a major tragedy like 9/11 or this pandemic. When you have these massive events, that upheave of civil order and all that, you inevitably get people that become opportunists in those moments. Snake oil salesman and trolls and people who want to take control of the narrative come out. It’s just like a pastor during a hard time wants to go in front of a church and say, “we have all the answers. God is testing us. This is the reason God planned this crazy thing.” It gives the members of the church comfort, a feeling they're on the inside. They're part of the plan.

And it's the same exact thing with conspiracy theories, where the the healthy skepticism you get after an event like JFK assassination or Watergate or whatever, it very rarely stays within that healthy skepticism. It usually ends up bleeding into deeper, more fantastical, sensationalist ideas, because people are never satisfied with the truth.

And the truth is that when you have these massive either tragedies or insane events, like at a high-level assassination like Epstein. The truth is that we'll never know. There's no way to ever know. And people are really uncomfortable with that. Just like they're uncomfortable with never knowing exactly how coronavirus spread.

Like I said, it's a natural thing to want to know that. And I think that there's something admirable and universal about people's drives to try to know about it and look into it and you can create logical lines of reasoning, whether you're a journalist or a researcher in so far as piecing together evidence and whatnot, to try to build a narrative. But at some point, in all of these situations, you ended up passing that point of a material reality and into the metaphysical, which is where the most people get swept up. On its own, like you mentioned the Denver, Colorado airport conspiracy, it doesn't necessarily have to be malicious.

There are conspiracy theories I got into as a kid that upon first glance, how I was looking into them, they were nothing. It was just for fun, but it turns out that, at their roots, there's more anti-Semitic inspiration and there's other dubious reasoning for their existence.

And those are obviously all problems that kind of work their way into grander conspiracy theory metanarratives like QAnon, that kind of embody a bunch of other conspiracy theories and drawing that line is impossible. If there's a scale of one to 10, it's great to use that to help visualize how this thinking works, but there's no hard-line number on that scale where you just all of a sudden get into the dicey territory. The whole thing is dicey and that's kind of part of the problem. You could theoretically be a healthy functioning person if you're just really skeptical and be at a five on that scale. You could also be, a mentally ill deranged person and be a five as well, and then easily slip into a six, seven, eight, nine within the next few weeks. So, it's really hard to gauge where that line is. 

Syran: I guess another thing about the popular conspiracy theories is that they really mold to us culturally, what a conspiracy theory is. And I've thought a lot about the language of how people talk about QAnon. A lot of times when I'm reading an article about Q that's new, I'm interested in how it's described. A lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm really looking at Q, and have been for a while, as a cult. [I’m interested in] when that language comes up and how it gets used. Something I took away from your article was that conspiracy theories are dangerous in a more profound way, in ways that are totally different than what my expectation was.

And I think that's a step towards people understanding that conspiracy theories aren't the moon landing necessarily, or that's not a great way to think about what a conspiracy theory is. Do you think as time goes on and this stuff is more seen in the culture, it will get labeled correctly more and people's connotations will move from the moon landing to more dangerous stuff?

Because that would be helpful, I would imagine.

What makes a conspiracy theory dangerous?

Nathan: I totally agree and I'm hoping that our language evolves with understanding these conspiracy theories. The term I like to use that I coined, I use the term ideological conspiracy theories because that helps me separate the QAnons and the Pizzagates and the New World Orders, and the Deep States, all that content from what you said, the moon landing to a bigfoot to UFO's there's all these other avenues of conspiracy thinking that have been really popular in pop culture over the decades. And I would still consider them conspiracy theories, but you're right in the sense that the language isn't really helpful and descriptive. Like we're saying both the moon landing and QAnon are conspiracy theories, [which is problematic] because they're just completely different ways of thinking and like the sort of drivers to get you to one or the other are also completely different.

Like you can stumble into the moon land and bigfoot going down a YouTube search rabbit hole. You end up watching a few videos and you think, “Oh wow, this is crazy. The government lied. This is nuts.” You ended up going back to work and never thinking about it again. Obviously, people in QAnon can tether any conspiracy theory into their metanarrative.

But those one-off ones aren't necessarily tethered to any giant, like meta conspiracy theory. So, you could theoretically just get into one and then that's it. And then you move on with your life.  You see your crazy uncle at Christmas every year and he brings up some one-off thing he read online or something, you just laugh at it, but with something like QAnon it's obviously an all-encompassing ideology that, like you said, ends up having real cultish elements and it's fleshed itself out in the real world. As far as followers and chance and symbology it's all encompassing in a way that other conspiracy theories aren't.

So, I agree. I think there needs to be some type of terminology that helps us separate the two, but I don't know if we're there yet.

Syran: Something I think is that QAnon, as [the groups get banned an it] becomes more just the fanatics- the numbers on QAnon are terrible, the stats are terrible I've never seen anything that personally reflects what I see what I've seen in social media circles of people who are actually in on it, because there's so many people that I think are just playing a game that have inflated the numbers. I think if you look at the people who have the beliefs, you’ve got to believe all the belief structures. The people who are really into it, which might only be like 2% of the people, they exhibit every single sign of a cult. It's totally a cult in that sense.

So, I think the language will maybe evolve too. When people write about it in the future, because of course people are going to, people are going to write about Q whatever happens, it doesn't matter if it dissolves, which I don't think it will, but it'll be something that people follow for a long time. We’ll understand later how much fat was on the bone.

And I think that thinking about Q will change too. Does that resonate at all with you?

Nathan: Yeah, I was going to say I totally agree, and I think that the problem is that there's two camps of people, where you have the more extremely online, super engaged people who, when they look at Q, they either know exactly what it is and they willfully participate, or they know exactly what it is and to them it's all just a big troll, like it's for the LOLs. And they don't really care whether or not it's real. It's something fun for them and they participate.

Then you have the sort of the quote unquote boomers. The people which could be all age groups, really, who stumble into it tangentially and they don't have any ideological tie to it, but they ended up amplifying the content and going and following the same sources.

But these are people, I'm sure you've done this, I've gone through tons of MAGA Twitter accounts. Just scrolled through their timelines and seeing their tweets and looked at their bio's and really what they stand for and all of that, and you see so much just organic crossover between the general MAGA space online and the QAnon space, because they obviously intersect. Tons of the sort of milk toast, MAGA accounts amplify and share with the QAnon accounts posts, because they're on the same team. But they don't necessarily follow what the actual conspiracy theory itself is. They just see stuff like, “Oh, this high-level Democrat is a pedophile. Yeah. I'm going to hit retweet on that,” not thinking about it in terms of this interwoven Deep State with all these moving pieces that they're super invested in. It's more just like an ideological ploy to them. I think that is a major problem because, a lot of them have been tanked now, but when you look at the biggest YouTube channels for QAnon, if some of these channels are getting in the uppers of hundreds of thousands of views, some even in the millions, and you look at what the actual content is, but then you think I can't imagine the majority of people who watched this video wholeheartedly believe what it's saying. It's more that they got funneled in here somehow. And there's elements of it that relate to the Democrats are evil and then they get in either like that, or they share it or whatever, but then they just move on.

This is an example of a QAnon meme regular old Republicans were sharing.

They're not like then going down the rabbit hole. And obviously there's a percentage of people that do go down the rabbit hole and they stay there. But I think you're right to point out that there's no good hard numbers showing you how deep the cult runs, whether it's 500,000 people, whether it's 5 million people, we just don't know because the waters have been completely muddied at this point.

When you mix all these different groups together and they amplify, you even have Trump amplifying hundreds of these tweets, but at least in theory, not necessarily having a very complex understanding of what exactly these are outside of just, “we're hunting democrat pedophiles.”

Syran: One thing about ideology that you were talking about, because this is something that I'm thinking about making a distinction of in my article, it's political. I have these left-wing cults where people find it impossible to get out. Some of the worst, most violent cults are the left-wing cults that I've looked at. The SLA is an example. And in Minnesota history, there's one [The O] that's really interesting in particular.

But I talked to somebody who was in that group and they just had socialist ideas. They were an advocate, they were fighting for women's rights and they found this group that was way more organized than anything they knew before. Then just get sucked in and, it took the leader of the cult, murdering somebody and going away before everybody was like, what the fuck is going on? What is happening here?

And I think the same thing, this is a part of Q, is that it really attracts people who already have some right-wing ideology. And if you're really a genuine QAnon adherent, in my opinion, one of the most important things is the Great Awakening, and Donald Trump is going to execute these people and it's going to make the world a better place. I really think in terms of people who have that ideology, are they ever going to get out of it? How are these people going to lose? Because when you read stories online about people who exit QAnon, they're not deeply political people. I think that there's a reason for that. They fit that profile [of someone who could easily exit.]

And I think there's a reason why this woman [Melissa Lively] who had her life destroyed by crazy conspiracy thinking is not out, is that she came into it with bad politics before. She had bad ideas before any of this shit happened. And Q seduces that. Do you think that's a legitimate idea?

Nathan: Absolutely. I think whatever fundamental, ideological drivers you go into a conspiracy theory like QAnon with, those are going to be the ultimate root that determine whether or not you get in or whether or not you get out, and whether or not you're going to be vulnerable to this type of thing. Moving forward in general, because I think that this is partially the reason why you see such a strong base in the conservative, evangelical community and also just the right wing community in general, because even beyond right wing politics in like the traditional sense, it’s known that the right wing has a bend toward nationalism and nationalism as just like a series of values as it like reinforces the thinking behind QAnon is just a huge ideological foundation to going into this world. A lot of these guys call themselves Patriots.

If you believe that you're a Patriot who is fighting for your country and your sent by God, and then all of the sudden one day you're magically, you're disillusioned by QAnon; you're over it. You're like, “Oh man, I got scammed.” Those foundational beliefs didn't go anywhere, and they could just as easily adapt any other framework that would pull you in the same direction.

So, I do think that's absolutely different than say, just like a lay person who's scrolling through the internet, doesn't have many deep convictions and they end up getting tied into this and it gives them a sense of purpose. Then one day they discover it's fake or they get bored. They move on.

Those types of people are always searching, and they don't have the same kind of foundational, even just, I would say the wiring of the brain, like their brains just haven't been reinforced. Whether it was like the childhood years of growing up and just a community of like-minded people, or just currently being surrounded by people who reinforced those beliefs.

These are the differences between someone who just stumbled into it versus someone who their whole life has been fed one very powerful narrative of an in-group, out-group belief system. And you're given a framework to make you more relevant. I think when you get a taste for that it's really hard to give up, especially because QAnon is so culturally relevant. And when you look at a lot of groups, whether it's MAGA or evangelicalism there's these portions of society that, as powerful as they are institutionally, they aren't very powerful culturally. These are groups of people that they themselves perceive as losing the culture wars.

They're outside of the norm, outside of the mainstream. With that said, these are people that now that they've found Q Anon, all of a sudden they're being talked about the news, they're being debated about. They're in the limelight.

You take a bunch of people who have felt like they've just been kicked out of the narrative for decades losing the battle of gay marriage and abortion and STEM cell research and porn. These are all things that right wing slash evangelicals have tended to fight for over the decades.

Now you've given them a narrative that's insanely relevant, insanely powerful, and even if it fell apart tomorrow the tenants that make it what it is can easily be transferrable to any other framework that would be equally powerful and culturally relevant to form around. Just like Pizzagate turned into QAnon and then QAnon transferred into Save the Children.

These are just really easy malleable frameworks that can continue people down a path without feeling like they have to let everything go and admit they were wrong or something, and then have to return with their head low to their community. “Oh, I've been lied to.” So instead, they can just slowly adapt to something new, which I think tends to be what happens with the more ideological based people.

Syran: I think those are a lot of reasons why getting out of QAnon is so hard, in terms of people who are in cults, which is what my research is about. Deprogramming was this huge phenomenon and the seventies and eighties primarily, which was a process of kidnapping people who were in cults and holding them prisoner somewhere and staying with them and talking to them and threatening them for however long it took for the person to break really. And it's got all this crazy legal precedent.

Nathan: It's super controversial. Yeah.

Painting of Ted Patrick, the inventor of deprogramming.

Syran: I think about what I read about deprogramming, because it's such a popular topic and it gets brought up in so many Q articles. I mean that Reddit space for survivors is mentioned all the time and there's all kinds of articles about how to get somebody out of out of Qanon that that I think is really sort of pseudoscience. You've got to think of it in terms of alcohol intervention or deprogramming and then it makes sense.

But the barrier to relapse is low. People get out of cults all the time, and then there's this period of thinking where everything's halfway and then a bunch of people return to their cults after they've had a breakthrough. And I think with QAnon, all you got to do is log into a website. If you get out of QAnon, and there's still a shadow of a doubt, there's a chance, a very good chance because it's so easy. You pick up your phone, and it's over your back in. I think there'll be a lot of really long time QAnon believers. I think, in a way, it's here to stay.

I don't know if it's going to remain such a hot topic. Nobody knows what will happen.

 Nathan: I think that most people outside of people like me or you that have looked into this stuff, most people today probably don't really know much about like real instances of deprogramming with cults. I think again, just like the problem with a lot of the terminology around this stuff, I think some people have a kind of crude idea of what it might be and how they could potentially implement their own version of it, at home with their mom or like within a group of friends, like with one of their buddies or something like that.

And yeah, like you said, it's more almost like an intervention, like a pseudo intervention style approach and yeah, this is such an interesting part of the conversation to me, because whenever I read these articles and like you said, Reddit posts and whatnot, of people that talk about this stuff, it's "Oh, what can we do?"

What is the solution to getting my mom and my friend out of this thing? I think the problem is that there is no solution. There's no catchall way to get people out of something that completely consumes, not just their day-to-day life, but just their entire psyche.

It goes so far beyond the kind of general framework in cases like Q Anon. And it goes deeper into a person's worldview and what they believe about the state of reality. There's people I know that I've had arguments with about some of this stuff. I could share with them statistics from a government website or like a direct report that has the data on something, and they just won't believe it.  They're just straight up in a different mode of reality. Like they, they don't operate under the same pretense of facts and information because in their worldview, all that information is fake news.

It's all propaganda. It's all being filtered through the Deep State. I think, yeah, once you get into that mode of thinking, it is incredibly difficult to break somebody out. And I almost think the only solution that seems to be common that I hear from a lot of people is, not like necessarily isolation, but the kind of breakthrough where the mom's son or the son's mom has to go to them and be like, “Hey, if you don't get out of this, then I'm leaving.” You kind of isolate yourself from people. And even in those cases, you still see a lot of these people choose QAnon over their own family and their own friends.

They go to their groups online. They say, “Oh, my daughter and my son stopped talking to me. I feel so alone. I’m thankful I still have my Q family.” I would equate it to gay marriage with Christian beliefs where the most common thing you hear is that somebody's kid or a friend of theirs comes out of the closet and then suddenly it just vastly changes their perspective. That’s an entire part of their ideology that they had been taught their whole lives, but it changes with the relationship.

I think in some sense, that's the most common one that we all hear, but even with that, there's just no data. There's no 10-step program to get people from A to B. It's just a crapshoot and entirely based from relationship to relationship in different circumstances.

It's really tricky. I never know. I always get grossed out when I see experts whether they're psychologists or journalists or whoever posing themselves with, “This is the way you get your family back,” because there just isn't a way. I guess you could pose potential solutions and list them out that people have tried, but every situation is different and it's just a really sticky mess to be in.

Syran: If you look at how people get into groups sometimes, it's all about bonding.

If you look up how people get into white supremacy, it's often because their friends were into it in real life. I think people join groups and become radicalized and they don't want to leave because their friends are there. These are the people that understand them. These are the people that don't pick on them.

I wonder what you think about that mode of thinking, because you have a lot more internet knowledge than I do [when it comes to] how we've created these online boroughs.

Nathan: Probably one of the central tenets or factors that has made Q Anon so successful is how they love bomb. The whole idea in cults where you just shower the members with love and affirmation and, “You're amazing. You're here for a reason.” That’s all over these Twitter groups, Facebook groups and whatnot. If you think about it online, whether it's Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit; these are all extremely volatile platforms where everybody is constantly spewing hate and polarization. People are getting angry at the latest news and they're slinging shit back and forth between the political rivals and things like that. So, when you have a group that feels completely insulated from all of that, because you have the one truth, and you have all these members that are just showering you with affirmation and telling you that you're a hero and that, the country is being saved because of you and that people like you are making the world a better place and all of that; that is just powerful.

I look at the circles that I run in on Twitter and it's people that I highly respect, obviously, but it's really negative.  Most of what I see go viral on Twitter is people dunking on someone they don't like. It's people being nihilistic, sarcastic cynical people, talking about how depressed they are about things.

When you have a group that you're bonded with and you absolutely align with them on ideological motivations and you share the same values and they're with you every single day, like side by side, you're on the same Twitter threads, “where you go one, you go all,” like you go as a group into these different corners of the internet.

It's just incredibly affirming. And I think a lot of time it insulates people from the problems of the world too, because for example, if you look at any even like a Bernie Sanders type, if you look at any ideological person or a group and how they move in and out of spaces online when they're on their own turf, they feel incredibly powerful.

If Bernie Sanders tweet something and it gets 10,000 replies, 9,000 of those replies are going to be his followers. And they're all going to be liking each other's comments and retweeting them and tagging them and stuff. And I think it has the same effect in QAnon. These groups, they go places together and even as they receive criticism and negativity, it's almost like it just slides off of them because they, in their minds, they know they have the truth. They have each other. They're insulated by their community and it's much harder to infiltrate that from the outside. So that aspect of, love bombing and affirmation and in some, not in all cases, but in a lot of cases, also just making people reliant on QAnon for their entire purpose. The people that are 100% all into this thing, obviously gets more and more separated from their loved ones in real life because they're spending all day and all night online with their online cult friends. So that aspect of it also just like reinforces the wedge between them and the outside world, where they just become extra reliant then on this group.

Syran: This is something I don't know anything about, but it's relevant to both conspiracy thinking and cults, which Q is both things at the same time. With Q, when I first saw it, I had the reaction a lot of people have when they first find out about Q and what their beliefs are. I thought, “What in the fuck is this stuff?” How do people possibly believe this fantastical horseshit? It's so irrational and based in fantastical thinking.

How do people get to a place where they believe irrational things like this?

Why do some people believe Angie was murdering babies to achieve her glow?

Nathan: You said it right there. The word rational. I think that's the problem. That's like the root of it all. This is not that the people are acting irrationally, it's that they're acting rationally in their own self-interest and I think it's among the same problems that you find in, whether it's behavioral economics or religion, where people just don't act rationally.

I think we live in a world where we're governed by a series of scientific processes and facts and in a material reality that kind of binds us, but most people don't build their worldviews on that foundation.

Most people, they start out in life with an idea of what their purpose is, whether it's through religion, whether it's through some other ideological framework, and they build from there, they build, growing up. It's, “Okay, I’m a Republican. My parents are Republicans. My neighbors are Republicans. The people I go to church with are Republicans and we’re also Christians. We believe these things.” As they go through life, whatever they consider to be rational is whatever reinforces that meta-narrative to them. I think, a lot of this is just semantics in terms of like how you define rational.

Syran: I really liked that. That's something I feel like is pretty easy to understand.

Nathan: Okay. Cool. Yeah. I wasn't sure if it was like coming off really confusing. 

Syran: No, it makes a lot of sense.

Nathan: So yeah, you can even just rephrase it.  Self-interest or whatever works, but yeah, to me that's the kind of the driving point to all this because you're absolutely right and then you get into this thing from the outside looking in, where it's like, “Oh my God, these people are insane. Like how could they ever believe this stuff?” But when you look at the populations around the world, not just in America, but most of the world is religious and most of the world believes in crazy shit and they think they've seen ghosts. They think they've seen UFO's. They believe in demons and that there's an afterlife and all this.

And I think what's even extra common is a lot of people in America believe in spiritual warfare. So, they believe their day-to-day actions are like a result of what's going on in this reality and then what's also going on in like a shadow world. I think that is the kind of the core of the problem, but it also speaks to just how easy it is for the average person to fall into all this shit, because you could also be somebody who, let's say, is relatively secular and you're not like ideologically pulled by one party or the other, but then you get sucked in by a new age group or some pseudoscience that is promising you healing or some shit.

And before you know it you have the same propensity to be sucked into this way of thinking, because I think even the people who are outside of religious fundamentalism or partisanship have those same intuitions, those same drivers that cause them to believe things that are irrational or to try things that are irrational. It challenges our assumptions about what is rationality and what do most people believe. Because even an atheist like Sam Harris, famously, is into psychedelics. Maybe he doesn't believe in a heaven and a hell, but he believes there could be something else metaphysical going on there.

It’s kind of like in the ether. Even when you talk to scientists and skeptics and all sorts of people, you can still oftentimes tease out some notion like, “Hey, who really knows?” There's still some mystery in the world. I think all of that leaves a lot of open space for crazy ideas to fester.

Syran: Obviously social media accelerated pseudoscience and bad ideas and I'll put QAnon in there as a bad idea factory. But there all kinds of bad ideas, all kinds of hoaxes. And I wonder if there was some kind of evolution that just accelerated that in social media because I don't remember this being like a phenomenon on MySpace. It seems like there's some step where all of a sudden, maybe it's a culture shift or something like that. Maybe I just don't know about the early internet. Copy pasta or something that I'm just unaware of.

Nathan: Yeah. You're thinking of creepy pasta? I don't know. We could obviously get deep into this topic, but it's also, I think it’s a lot more simple than most people would want to believe. I think really, it just comes down to the centralization of the internet. Because this type of stuff did exist in like the early 2000's.

I forget, there was the Dove of Oneness. And then NESARA, there were a few internet based cults and conspiracy theories that floated from the early 2000’s, mid 2000’s. And obviously like 4chan. Whether it was an anonymous group or, like you said, the creepy pasta, there's different things that have festered around.

Does this bullshit look familiar?

I don't know this for a fact, but I'm pretty sure that the Denver airport conspiracy theory popularized on like YouTube too. Like before that, I don't think it was like anywhere. So anyway, I think that there's something to be said about, like, this thinking has always been with us.

Even like the earliest days of YouTube and shit with Alex Jones posting his Obama documentary; their quote unquote documentaries. But I think the kind of inference to the simplest explanation is really just the fact that now we have billions of people on the internet.

The internet is extremely young. There's not good regulations in place. There's not good media literacy in our education system and the fact that all these people have access to all this information with a very little moderation, very little tools to guide them through the space. I think it just creates breeding grounds for all sorts of opportunists beyond just conspiracy theories and to just straight extremism in all forms. Whether it's anti-Muslim bigotry or general fascism, or even really any kind of extremist ideology. There's just really anything you could ever have imagined before the internet.

Now it exists in a much more centralized form where like-minded people can easily find each other. They can easily find groups they can connect with and easily amplify each other's messages, which just makes all these things way worse. I think that's the simplest explanation.

Syran: Do you think the people that originate this content, is it a game to them? Or are these believers, because they're just these original ideas. And I think about this with whoever is running Q, like what do they think? I want to know what they think about this. They know that there's all these people that are just fucking up their lives with this stuff. And I think content creators in, especially thinking about 4chan; my opinions of people on 4chan are not  very high or my  experience with websites like that is it's ugly and disgusting. Maybe it's just the little bit I saw was gross. But it's supposed to be extreme. The ideas are supposed to be extreme because you're trying to get a rise out of people. And I think there's an element of that in the content creation.

I have no idea, but I wonder if you have any ideas about the people who create the ideas that become conspiracy theories, or elements of Q.

Nathan: Right. This is really interesting because I would say this is where you get the convergence between internet culture from sites like 4chan and Reddit and just normy culture, like boomers on YouTube or Facebook or whatever, because I think prior to 2010, the vast majority of people uploading conspiracy theory content to the internet were just fringe boomers and fringe activists or quote unquote activists.

People that saw themselves as like an investigative reporter who had a bunch of clips they tied together and then they narrated it was inspirational music and uploaded it to YouTube or like with 4chan, conjured up some like insane narrative and then seeing if it takes off. You saw all that type of stuff was on the fringes.

But then what happened was between 2010 and 2016, you had the kind of growing emergence of trolling culture, where what started on 4chan ended up becoming an internet wide phenomenon between Reddit and Twitter and YouTube, where you have all these users on 4chan just inspiring other users that kind of cross-pollinated between platforms.

Most of these people, I think, I shouldn't say, we'll never know the numbers, but pulling it out of my ass, I would imagine that around this time you have 40 to 50% trolls and like 50 to 60% actual reactionaries that were either somewhat politically or culturally engaged.

And this was an outlet for them on 4han or Reddit. And these groups merged with the election cycle of Donald Trump. And the problem with that is beforehand you would have been able to separate the kind of ironic shitposting of this is a person just doing this for the LOLs or whatever.

Then with the election, those forces integrated with actual ideological partisans. And from there you had this bridge into these internet cultures, these internet subcultures, where otherwise normal people got a window in and they could start consuming this content and then creating it for themselves.

I think between late 2014 and 2016, and of course later, it's even worse today, but especially around then you started to see more of an explosion of a conspiracy theory content, like even taking flat earth for example, you just didn't see flat earth as a subculture online up until the more like centralization of the internet and the politicization of a lot of this stuff.

So, I think there was just this like really weird period of the 2016 election where all these things were happening at once and it was creating multiple pipelines into places like 4chan and Reddit and YouTube and Twitter, where then otherwise normal people were getting sucked into this stuff and then they themselves were becoming content producers.

And that's when it got weird, because I think beforehand it would have mostly just been trolls or fringe reporters making weird videos. But from that point, you started to get this combination where people might have come from trolling backgrounds, but now they wholeheartedly believe this shit.

Or you have people that just came to it with a blank slate or from Christianity or right-wingers, whatever. And now they're on YouTube creating Pizzagate style content about the Deep State. Maybe they got really into Alex Jones because he started going more and more viral around this time as well.

I think at this point, I would say most of the content creators you see wholeheartedly believe this shit. And to them, the reason they keep doing it is because it gives them meaning and it gives them a sense of, it's like a hobby to them, but it's not just playing video games. They're actually wholeheartedly invested in like solving these grandiose puzzles that are like interconnected webs across the world and across decades, just this deep, made up narrative that they've conjured. I think that's where it's at now, but it wasn't always like that.

I think it's definitely only been since a combination of the centralization of the internet and then the 2016 election blurring in a lot of those lines and creating more access to this type of content. Just everyday weirdos who have access to a smartphone and some computer editing software. And now they're just uploading videos and creating landing pages and Instagram accounts that have produced their shit because it's giving them a hobby and friends and a sense of like activism almost.

Syran: The phenomenon that you're talking about, where things got weird, and all these people were making content all the sudden that I watched was Save the Children. There was such a huge diversity of memes. I think a lot of people that didn't have anything to do with bullshit like get into Q really got into [Save the Children] and they might've been creating content too.

There's so many different ways to say things that are misleading. The meme that I saw, that really was where I went, “what the fuck is this?” when I didn't know what QAnon was, is a meme with Mark Zuckerberg. They say he is a pedophile and he was on Jeffrey Epstein's flight. And that spread everywhere and I knew it was bullshit because I followed the Epstein case. And how insane is it that it's being spread? How could you have an idea like that and not look it up and press retweet or whatever? I don't know. I have questions about the content.

QAnon knew where to focus its message when the fact check came out and groups started getting banned on Facebook.

Nathan: It's the same exact thing with the trafficking statistics, like the 800,000 kids a year mysteriously vanish and all these massive numbers that could spread around and they're all different. None of them are based in reality. I shouldn't say that, some of them are based in a very loose reality. Some of them are just completely bogus.

Syran: Yeah. The 400,000 number is the most conservative and that's it's also misleading.

Nathan: Yeah, exactly. And I've seen other ones that were literally just like 2.2 million and looking it up I can't even figure out like where and how they got that number. Did they just combine a bunch of reports or something? It's insane. I think too, nowadays versus even just five years ago, there's way more like apps on your phone that you can just download that can help you create like aesthetically pleasing content like that, where you can plug in the numbers and it outputs, like a beautiful looking image that you can share and everybody sees it and they just think, “Oh, this looks totally legit. I'm going to share it.” And they don't bother ever looking it up.

Syran: One of these things that I'm thinking now differently is, if they go underground and there's way less of them will they miss the news or attention? But I really don't know if they're going to leave. Do you think Q will ever be exposed?

Nathan: No. This is like a really popular point that I know a lot of people focus on because it's fun. And just there's this weird obsession online where people think, “Oh, if only, if we had absolute confirmation that this person was Q,” all of a sudden the believers would just give up and realize they've been lied to and that everything will be fine when I just don't think at this point there's anything that would ever stop people from believing this stuff. It doesn't matter if there was a smoking gun and we had all the receipts.

The people at this point are so deep, they would just believe it's a Deep State set up. I also think it's been so long, QAnons is going on three years now, that it's been around and for the people that have followed it closely, and I haven't followed it that closely in the past three years, but I talked to a lot of reporters that have, and I have myself have actually gone through the archives from like back then to now with the Q drops.

You can clearly see tonal shifts and subject matter shifts that are really blatant to the point where it's almost 100% a different person. And I think that there's a million theories as to who it is. If it's one person, if it's a group. It's changed over time, if it's been the same person. I think the problem with theorizing about a lot of this stuff is that it actually forces you to use the same tools that they use, where you're like creating literal conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theory, because there's not a lot of evidence to base a thesis around.

I think the clearest lines we can draw at this point is that it's most likely been more than one person over time.

Syran: I think there's a lot of worry about, what if Q incites violence or something like that. It has incited violence, but where there's an actual, like pretty blatant suggestion in a Q drop. If something crazy happens, I just don't think it's in whoever's making this best interest or all the authors, all these people, it's not in their best interest to do something that could really make it go away through changes in law that would just shut it off the internet or something.

Nathan: Exactly. I think that's the key to all this. At the end of the day, it's a grift. And at the end of the day, it's a LARP because these guys are all live action role playing heroes of the country, heroes of the world. And like you said, I think at some level, maybe it's subconscious, but I think most of them probably know that if Q were to incite violence and if there was like a large scale incitement of violence in general, between members that were committing crimes or whatever, that those are the types of things that would get the entire operation shut down from like a complete internet wide level, because no one, not even the most quote unquote, free speech platforms would ever want to host that type of content.

So I think somewhere deep down, most of them know that, and it's almost like, I don't want to compare it to leftist because  it's different in a way, but there are accelerationist revolutionaries on the far left who also fantasize about revolution in the US and it's done so in this kind of obscuring way where like they'll make jokes about guillotines and eating the rich and all that.

And in order to stay in the satirical, “we mean it, but we don't really mean it” way, because of the consequences for having that type of speech. I think that's the dance that most QAnon members are also doing right now. Where It's just most of them are trying to stay in that middle ground.

And each of them, I think, are hoping that a literal revolution is going to happen. Like you said, the Great Awakening where Trump is going to lead the people and send all these Democrats to Gitmo or whatever. That's what I was trying to get in the very beginning.

I think most of them, if this whole thing dissipated, I think they would just move on to the next conspiracy theory rather than inciting mass violence. Cause I think at the end of the day, for most of them, it's just a live action role playing type of thing, but who knows? We don't know because it's because it is a cult, so it could go either which direction, but that's the feeling I get at least with most of these people.

What's it called? Apocalypticism. I think that's the term where it's the same thing found in evangelicalism where people believe that God is going to return to the earth. There's going to be a rapture. There's going to be a war where the antichrist is like trying to create a one world government and all this shit.

And you’ve got guys like Pat Robertson on TV preaching about the end times and how now, the time it's finally happening, like Christians be prepared for the antichrist and the second coming and all this shit. On some level that is scary because you do have people deep down believing this is going to happen, but at the same time, the way they live out their lives is counterintuitive to that nature.

I don't know, it's really hard to pin down the intentions and the consequences of that thinking.

Syran: What I think would make it more dangerous is if there were sects in Q, like if there were splintering groups, if people were really arguing with each other over this stuff, and then they would separate and talk in different places, but that doesn't seem to happen.

And it's been around for, it's been here for three years, but it has not splintered and there's not like a more extreme, there's not a side that says we should be more violent and people are supporting that or creating a more extreme Q. It's hard to think of a more extreme version of Q, but it would have to go somewhere else to be extra violent.

And really when you see Q's in the real world, [outside of what happened at the capitol] they come out one at a time, unless it's like a Trump rally. People individually do stupid things like go to the beach with knives to stab Joe Biden or whatever. It's one person, all these things that are happening. It's never been a couple people who would do these crazy things in the real world that become legal cases.

And I think too, there's a danger on the left side. With something like Antifa, it's not real, it's a myth, but it's not unrealistic at all that people could radicalize. I'm writing something about the Symbionese Liberation Army because there was this fugitive from that cult that lived in hiding in Minnesota for 27 years before they found her. And there's a lot of stuff when I was actually typing it out, like what their beliefs were, and all the elements that are culty in their ranks. It sounds like real life Antifa.

 I should think about how I word this because I live in a really lefty place where people talk about like killing cops on the internet. That total lefty way where it's not really taken seriously, but that's a situation where these people took it real seriously and were real violent and killed innocent people. There's so many ideas that are bad ideas, that you never know what's going to happen or, of course, there's all these right wing militia groups and stuff like that.

I have one last question. This is what I was looking for before. And this is about QAnon articles, QAnon writing, and the information that gets out there, popular stuff.

I think there's a big scale of what the press looks like. Adrian LaFrance has that big article that really...

Nathan: Yeah, that article is amazing.

Syran: It's the basis of the explosion of Q content. I think it’s what so many journalists turned to and all of a sudden, I feel like everybody needed Q content. And I think there's a lot of people who don't understand it, who make articles, big articles, about it.

There's a New York Times article I'm thinking of where they had this person who had the academic profile to be an expert, but the thinking was wrong. She talked about beliefs that QAnon had that weren't actually real. They weren't circulating in the groups that I followed.

I look at a lot of different stuff in different compartments of social media. And a lot of the sources are recycled in articles. I recycled this QAnon woman [Lively,] but one of the guys, there's an Australian guy who escaped Q who was a Sanders supporter because he follows American politics and he's been in multiple, different articles and, you know, some people want press for this stuff. Definitely, [Lively] wants the press, is cool with being in QAnon.

She's just going to get run over when, I'm not going to have much impact because I'm in a smaller market, but if she keeps talking to the press, she's going to get fucked up by the machine when she gets outed. Which could be super bad for business that she's built back up.

Do you think [QAnon] gets so much attention because it's fun to write about and editors just want a Q story. The original Q story I pitched had an element where I was deceiving people. And I got approved with that as the whole conceit. It was just like, “This is Q. This is different. Let's do it.” So, I guess, yeah, I wonder will how we cover Q evolve? It'll take a while, but it depends on what happens with Q and if it maintains this profile, but this shit will be studied in the future because it will be American history that's really thorough because people are fascinated by it and it gets so much press in a way that has been consistent. Q's been in the news for a year. Why do you think that is? Is it just a fun subject to write on? Obviously, people have different reasons for doing it. I definitely think the people where it’s closer to home make better content.

I'm not putting myself in that at all, but it is close to home for me and I know it just because I've read so much of it. I think about the decisions journalists make. This fucking guy [Travis View] with the QAnon podcast is brought on as an expert all the time. Even in the NYT. Whenever anybody who doesn't really understand this stuff needs an expert, he's just an authority overnight.

Travis View is not an expert.

My opinion is that I don't know if this is the be all end all of a cult expert. Not even close, actually. I think a psychologist is an interesting person to talk to for understanding what Q is. So many people ignore the ideas of, “Why Q?” Or don't investigate it. And I think there's content that just does a disservice to understanding Q and thinking about any kind of solution.

I don't know if there is a solution and like you said, I don't know that there's really a good way to get people out of it or anything like that, but I feel like, I don't know, there's all these perspectives and so much content. I just wonder if you have anything to add to these ideas.

Nathan: I'll give you a three-pronged answer because I do have a lot of feelings on the subject. To be perfectly frank, I think the leading reason that QAnon has gotten the coverage it's gotten is solely due to market forces. I think it's almost a carbon copy of the rise of the alt-right and 4chan and all that during the 2016 election cycle, where you had the emergence of the culture wars with figures like Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos.

They were going through the motions and people were writing about them and following them and then all of a sudden with Trump's election, there was this explosion of content and everybody needed to get on the beat. People are looking for answers. So, you have this market demand, or if the Atlantic publishes a story about it, the New York Times has to publish a story about it.

And it just goes all the way down the line, where everybody is looking for their piece of the pie. I absolutely think that's the leading force behind the whole thing. I don't even necessarily mean it to be bad. It's just the reality how this stuff works. I watched it unfold in real time to go from journalists like Ben Collins and people like him that had been covering it for years.

Syran: Yeah. That guy's a step ahead of all the regular reporters because he's been there for so long.

Nathan: Totally. And then you see just like you said, you see these like more establishment pieces come out and place like the New York Times that are just like completely lacking any real intimate knowledge and expertise in this area. They're just piecing together what it is from other articles. I think that's the biggest part of it. Obviously there's also an element, like you mentioned, that it is just a fascinating topic and it's really bizarre and that makes people more curious and there are people looking for answers.

If you've got a bunch of people who know something about it, like you and I have experienced, like people in your family or your friend circles. Or you see it online where people are posting about it and it piques your curiosity. You're like, “why is this going on?” That obviously makes perfect sense to me as well. I also think this is the more cynical side of my take.

You have the sort of… There's so many different ways to phrase this. I'm trying not to be super polarizing with it. You have this kind of like high-minded liberal elitism, I'll say, that in a lot of the publications, not all of the writers for these publications, but for places like the Atlantic or like the New York times, you have this kind of self righteous, like high in the sky view, like they're above those stupid people down there, those gullible people that have fallen for these crazy conspiracy theories and, what kind of idiot would believe this stuff?

Something you noticed, I'm sure you notice this too, I should say I noticed, is that when you look at most of the original reporting that kind of went viral in the wake of the pandemic around Q Anon, there was just this  heavy emphasis on, “Oh, it's this crazy conspiracy where people believe there’s a satanic cannibal of pedophiles in the government and in the elites and they're trying to take the kidnapped children and eat them and shit. And obviously that's true. That's part of it. And obviously that's a clickbaity, really good hook to get people to listen to you. But the way I saw that unfold on late night shows and on media publications, it was very clearly spoken to from this, like, above the average person. Like, “Wow, look at these moronic nut jobs that believe this stuff.” And I think that is a huge problem in the general media landscape when it comes to this stuff, just like it was with the alt-right stuff. And there's this kind of this mindset of, “what kind of idiot would believe this” and what that does is it reinforces those people's narratives.

And it also gives fellow like liberals, centrists, or whatever, the kind of the people that would be living in DC or New York or LA, it gives them not only a sense of superiority, but a sense of immunity to all of this, which they're not immune.

I think that's the most toxic element of all of this coverage is that you now have millions of people who think they're inoculated to conspiracy theory thinking because of how absurd QAnon has been reported on. And it decreases empathy. It decreases with people's ability to understand, “why?” like you mentioned the why behind these beliefs.

It also, it just leaves people open to this type of thinking. I noticed around the time when the the Ron Watkins story was breaking with how, it was like the cloud share company he owned, they released the fact that he owned the one of the Q drop URLs or whatever.

And people were like, “Oh my God, Ron Watkins owns Q maps. That means he is Q!” Then all of the sudden I was getting dozens of these people in my mentions, who are people who follow me on Twitter, and you look at their accounts and they're like resistance type people. They're never-Trumpers. They're high-minded liberals, they're retweeting the Atlantic and shit. And I've got all these people in my reply section being like, “it's so crazy that Ron Watkins is Q” like, “are you going to talk about how Ron has been uncovered as Q” and all this shit And I'm just like, literally none of this is true.

None of this has been proven. There's no reporting on any of this. You found one piece of information that told you what you wanted to hear, and you literally became the conspiracy theorist in this situation.

That's the kind of long-winded way of getting back around the fact that I think, yeah, reporting around this stuff has been dog shit.

And also, it’s just natural due to market forces. You get like one out of 10, maybe of the reporters who are really good and they spend intimate time getting to know this stuff, and they're fascinated by it.  People like you that are like doing the work, and that's all awesome. And then the kind of like overarching stench you get from the outside looking in to this stuff. This elitism that these people are just so you know, above and beyond any kind of conspiracy thinking looking at these imbeciles down here.

I've even gotten feedback from acquaintances of mine from my hometown who have mocked me personally, and reached out to me being like, like “LMAO, why are you covering all this QAnon stuff?” Acting like it's a big deal.

Like, “you think you're better than people that believe this shit,” that type of attitude. And I've had to be like, “Holy shit. Am I coming across like one of these people?” Because I don't mean to sound like I'm like high in the sky, but I think it's really hard to not report on [the crazy stuff] because of the nature of how crazy it is.

And I think that a lot of journalists have done a disservice by not riding that tension and instead just completely feeding into the sensationalism of it, which is really shitty.

Syran: QAnon believes that the elites are sucking adrenochrome out of babies heads. How do you not write that sentence? I can see where that can go wrong though. Of course, in QAnon all the beliefs are bad. Every single idea there isn't a good idea. That was what this Melissa Lively did was say, “Oh, I was into the wellness and spirituality and then I saw like a racist thing and I'm not a racist.”

She really made it seem like, “I was only doing this one thing.” I know what Q looks like. It's the same content everywhere. Yeah, there was some there's bogus versions of [wellness groups] to try to suck people in, but the content is always the same.

It’s hard not to repeat a story when it’s the craziest thing you’ve ever heard.

Everything about QAnon sucks except for this incredible image a real person designed. Holy shit!

Nathan: And to be clear, I think that’s fine. I just want to, on the record or whatever, say I don't think it's bad or wrong to report on those extreme elements. I just think it's all about the way that you do it. You know what I mean?  It's obviously an important part to mention the blood libel, the pedophilia and all that, but it's just the kind of like sensational playing up the sensationalism for clicks and then feeling superior is what really bothers me.

Syran: I've got a little bit of a pickle about that with my [Lively] situation.

Nathan: I get, no, dude, I get it. And I wouldn't, if you publish this story tomorrow and there was some of that shit in there, I wouldn't judge you. I've published for a Vulture about this before. And the title they went with and everything was like… what the editors went with was nothing like what I wanted. At a certain point, it is what it is. I try not to fault individuals over it. It's more just the zeitgeist that fucks with people.

Syran: But if you look at the history of news. Stories come in and are big news for a while, and then just disappear and people aren't interested in them anymore, that's the news cycle. That's why we call it a cycle. But QAnon really has some staying power. Do you think it's a news phenomenon? That it has such life? Or do you think it'll go away as it, the group is going to get way smaller?

Nathan: I think Ben Collins has this right where he half-jokingly says in his Twitter bio that he's on the dystopia beat. I think that's more what this whole thing is and what it will become. I don't know. I think like you said, I think QAnon will continue to exist in some form into the next several years ahead, but I also think that it's already transforming, and we've seen it transform to Save the Children, we're going to see it continue to transform into new culture ars and to new makeshift political ideologies and stuff like that.

So, I don't see it being a mainstay, but it's going to be one of those things, just like the alt-right, where even today, if a mass shooting happens tomorrow and there's like an alt-right like manifesto or something tied to it, obviously all the same reporters that covered the alt-right four years ago are all going to come back out, referencing their old pieces and being like, “here we go again.” I think it'll more likely have that type of effect where like every few months, or every couple of times a year, there's going to be a big QAnon story.

Everybody remembers the craziness and then they go back to the normal culture wars stuff. But I do think that, like we've been saying, I think it's more of the mindset and the ideology behind QAnon. That definitely isn't going to go away and it's going to keep evolving into new groups, new subcultures.

We're just going to continue seeing the effects of this into the foreseeable future, unfortunately. We already know it has its origins in ancient Jewish blood liable and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and the red scare. There's so many different origins to this story that have been going on for a long time, so I don't think there's any reason to think that it's going to go away.