When the anonymous high-level government employee decided to reveal what she knew, she (or he) went where anyone would go if they had urgent information to reveal: 4chan. The “crumbs,” as the clues were called, first appeared in the thread “The Calm before the Storm,” posted to the 4chan board /pol/ in October 2017. The employee, known only as “Q,” threw out possible hints about a massive—yet entirely covert—counterattack being waged by President Donald Trump against the Deep State, the government pedophiles, the Clintons, Satanists—anyone and everyone dedicated to keeping him down.

In a way, the whole idea was almost charmingly naive: that Trump was secretly doing a really good job and all his faithful needed to do was wait patiently for justice and vindication. Many were thrilled by the idea that the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Trump’s possible collusion with Russia during the 2016 election was really an inquiry into Hillary Clinton and other Democrats, and soon he would sweep out of his office and arrest them all.

With a message of hope and the suggestion of impending, possibly violent, justice, Q garnered a breathless online following dedicated to decoding every missive. By the summer of 2018, people waving Q signs and wearing Q T-shirts were seen popping up at Trump rallies. Mainstream media ran endless QAnon explainers, triggering a wave of public ridicule and backlash that only further convinced Q’s followers they were on the right track. It was a classic conspiracy theory, and it was harmless—a gigantic, increasingly contorted online community, essentially—until it wasn’t. Soon, as so often happens, the mission started to leak offline, and people took matters into their own hands.

In June 2018, Matthew P. Wright of Nevada drove a self-made armored car halfway across a bridge near the Hoover Dam, stopped there, and held up a sign: “RELEASE THE OIG REPORT!” QAnon followers were convinced that a report released by the FBI’s Office of the Inspector General—a six-hundred-page examination of the FBI’s actions leading up to the 2016 election—wasn’t a true report. The real one, they knew, fully exonerated Trump of meddling in the vote or obstructing justice. Wright, armed with an AR-15 rifle and a handgun, complained in a video shot on his phone that Trump himself had also betrayed his followers. “We the people demand full disclosure,” Wright said. “We elected you to do a duty. You said you were going to lock certain people up if you were elected. You have yet to do that. Uphold your oath!”

Wright fled after blocking the bridge for an hour and was later arrested on a rich variety of criminal charges. In letters he wrote to the president and other public officials from jail, he referred to the “Great Awakening”—a popular QAnon phrase—and apologized, in a way, for his impulsivity. “I am no seditionist, nor do I wish to fight the government. I understand that the evil and corruption is limited to a select few in power and that the greater good is doing its best to combat this,” he wrote. “I never meant harm to my brothers and sisters. I simply wanted the truth on behalf of all Americans, all of humanity for that matter.” He signed off with another QAnon slogan: “Where we go one, we go all” (sometimes shortened to #WWG1WGA).

With unmistakable shades of Pizzagate and a significant overlap in followers, Q’s adherents also believed the Trump administration was poised to arrest dozens of high-level pedophiles in government. An armed vigilante group in Arizona called Veterans on Patrol came across an abandoned homeless encampment in the summer of 2018. VOP’s leader, Michael Meyer—who is not actually a veteran—claimed they had in fact stumbled upon a property being used as a “child sex camp.” Sex-trafficking cartels, backed by the Clinton family and other elites, were purportedly involved with the Cemex cement company, which had a plant not far from the abandoned encampment. In protest, Meyer climbed a tower at the Cemex plant and refused to come down for nine days. He was arrested for trespassing; soon after his release, he posted the hashtag #WWG1WGA on his Facebook page.

QAnon was illustrative of two things. It showed how conspiracy theories reliably change form to encompass the anxieties of the day, which is why Trump supporters, in the middle of an intensifying investigation into Russian collusion, adopted the idea as an alternate narrative of the president’s secret competence and success. And conspiracy theories are, in the end, not so much an explanation of events as they are an effort to assign blame. More than questioning an official narrative, they are aimed at identifying the real perpetrators, the true power behind the throne, the hidden hand pulling beneath the surface. QAnon shifted in the way that conspiracy theories always do, from trying to solve a mystery to nailing the real villains and bringing them to justice.

The impulse is understandable, and it is an extension of our normal desire to hold power accountable. Often the motivations of ordinary conspiracy theorists are harmless: a desire to improve the world, to explain suffering—one’s own and that of others—and to remedy injustice. People join the “truth community” to help expose the inner workings and also to be part of something, to be one of the select few who know what’s really going on.

But in the early years of the twenty-first century, people feel particularly dispossessed by a political process bound by two unresponsive parties, an ever-growing ocean of dark money, and representatives who become more inaccessible with each passing year. They feel that our lives are controlled by corporations and federal agencies they cannot see or appeal to. They want to fight back. And once you see the truth, in fact—once the light has penetrated the life you previously led and the lies you previously believed—who could do otherwise? For some, inaction feels morally intolerable. Think of Edgar Welch, the Pizzagate gunman, grimly dressing in the dark, leaving his sleeping children, and climbing into his car.

What’s more: we like conspiracies and seem to genuinely enjoy sharing them. These murky real-world mysteries can feel like the junk food of entertainment, and we cram them into our mouths as fast as they are produced. This observation is not sanctimony; the data affirms the greedy consumption of conspiracy. A study by researchers at Oxford University noted that during the 2016 election, Twitter users were just as likely to share links to “polarizing and conspiratorial junk news” as they were to share professionally produced news created by journalists. “The number of links to Russian news stories, unverified or irrelevant links to WikiLeaks pages, or junk news was greater than the number of links to professional researched and published news,” the study claimed.

“Indeed,” it added, “the proportion of misinformation was twice that of the content from experts and the candidates themselves. Second, a worryingly large proportion of all the successfully catalogued content provides links to polarizing content from Russian, WikiLeaks, and junk news sources.” The word “polarizing” has a specific, and alarming, meaning, the authors noted. “This content uses divisive and inflammatory rhetoric and presents faulty reasoning or misleading information to manipulate the reader’s understanding of public issues and feed conspiracy theories.” Truth and fact-checking travel along the same paths that conspiracies do. But the truth is often complicated, shaded, and demanding, and there’s no denying that it often lacks the powerful, emotional, gut-level appeal of a conspiracy.

Furthermore, by creating a legible moral map of the universe, conspiracism can lead to a particular lack of empathy, a route so simple and straight and perilously narrow it points, at times, directly to hatred. If you have found a genuine foe, you are free to loathe him or her as expansively as necessary. The self-investigators cannot feel compassion for Seth Rich’s family or the families of the Sandy Hook children or the Las Vegas shooting victims, because in a universe peopled with false-flag attacks and crisis actors, they are on the wrong side of truth. The world is divided into secretive, shadowy perpetrators and the few righteous detectives, hellhounds on the trail of an explosive secret.

Beyond building an environment of misinformation and secrecy, conspiracy theories also have the worrisome effect of inducing paralysis, even as they galvanize those at the extreme end to extreme action. Two social psychology researchers at the University of Kent in England found that exposure to anti-government theories made people less likely to want to vote. People subjected to climate change conspiracy theories were less motivated to reduce their carbon footprint. The theories, according to one of the researchers, Karen Douglas, writing in the New York Times, can work directly and subtly to “decrease social engagement” because “they left people feeling powerless.” These findings suggest a troubling symbiosis. As conspiracy sellers become more energized, more profitable, and more politically committed, they feed what seems to be a strength-sapping potion to viewers and listeners.

As we have seen, there is no shortage of people willing to profit from a population’s distrust and disengagement, from the impulse to expose evil and the desire to right wrongs. Thus ordinary people become the willing foot soldiers of a mob of fame-hungry provocateurs such as Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones, whose paranoid fantasies then ripple outward and touch us all. As a result, the Rich family and the Pozners, having suffered the most profound and wrenching of losses, have to contend with harassment and threats to their safety.

There are no immediately OBVIOUS, foolproof brakes available. There is no mechanism to prevent another Edgar Welch storming into a pizza place or another James Fields getting behind the wheel, speeding toward Heather Heyer. Welch’s fiancée and his closest friends couldn’t talk him out of taking that drive. People who have journeyed to the dangerous far end of conspiratorial extremism are not amenable to the reason that might resonate with the rest of us. Countering an idea that has taken root is incredibly hard. Studies suggest that trying to argue someone out of a conspiratorial belief does not work, likening conspiracy theories to religious faith, which helps us see how they can be similarly fixed in the mind.

In a 2018 study, Virginia Tech researchers Mattia Samory and Tanushree Mitra looked at the contents of several conspiratorial Reddit boards and, among other recommendations, suggested that dissuading someone from a conspiracy theory would be more successful if the believer were a recent convert. “A good course of action to mitigate the problem is to catch new conspiracy theorists early,” Samory told Wired. “They’re the fastest to radicalize, they’re the ones that remain the most engaged, but they also have the highest amount of distrust” before they’re fully invested.

The popularity and durability of conspiracism means that it will always have its huckster street preachers such as Jones and Cernovich. But beyond the individuals, we need to look at the systems that made them so influential. Social media has created the world’s most efficient vehicle of delivery for conspiracy theories. Combined with the hyperpolarized state of American politics and the resurgence of white supremacist and nationalist movements, social media provides a virtual assembly line for scapegoats, a systematized and lightning-fast way to spread blame, doubt, enmity, and politically expedient rumormongering.

The bandage responses proposed by social media companies have largely been late, muddled, and inconsistent: banning Alex Jones from Twitter and Facebook or asking him to delete individual tweets cannot be a wholesale solution to the problem of his immense reach. Such measures were not even intended as solutions; their goal was to lessen the companies’ legal exposure and their chance of being held liable in a civil lawsuit, and probably to relieve the pressure of consumers calling for sponsors to pull advertising money.

The consequences of these small steps might help to diminish the power of some individual conspiracists, and the mainstream attention has had an unintentional benefit: Alex Jones had been making some truly vile arguments for decades; once he began receiving broad attention, the negative consequences for him also grew. (Besides social media bans, he was sued in the spring of 2018 by three Sandy Hook parents, including Lenny Pozner, for defamation.) In the case of Milo Yiannopoulos, the anti-feminist troll who flirted with white nationalism, his permanent ban from Twitter in 2016 (for directing an online mob to harass actress Leslie Jones) and the cancellation of a lucrative book contract certainly curtailed his power.

Ultimately, social media cannot be held directly responsible for the virulence of conspiracy theories. The same Internet that spreads garbage has also toppled regimes, created a megaphone for marginalized voices, exposed injustice, fomented discussion, and held power to account. Free speech is a social good and an American value, and the Internet should be allowed to function in a way that enhances that value.

People such as Lenny Pozner, the father of a child killed in Sandy Hook, have called for more stringent regulation of the Internet, which has undeniably been used as an instrument of torture against his family. Yet some proposals—like pressuring social media platforms to flag conspiracy theories as hate speech and remove the pages spreading them on those grounds—involve trusting companies like Facebook to distinguish between constitutionally protected speech and other kinds. Those companies, tasked with such a mammoth and nuanced task in a chaotic media environment, are inevitably going to make some incorrect calls. The exploitation of intellectual property, though, like the photos Pozner took of his son now used without his permission, should elicit a better, swifter response than a form letter from Google or YouTube. There are rules in place to prevent that exploitation, rules that need only to be enforced.

Social media aside, it is our job to counter bad speech with better speech. We have to find a way to flag and debunk disinformation even as we try to avoid promoting it. And we should provide as much information as possible about the pipelines that carry misinformation to effectively disable them. We have to figure out better ways to confront directly the propaganda and outright lies crowding the media ecosystem, as reporter Sarah Jones wrote in the New Republic in the summer of 2017. We cannot simply scoff at it as fake and turn our backs, because millions of people across the country are not doing the same.

“The alternative,” Jones wrote, “is to allow conservative propaganda to fester. An impenetrable bloc of voters will continue to blame Latinos for their woes, to ignore basic facts that are staring them in the face, to trumpet American exceptionalism while neo-Nazis roam the streets, and to look to a strongman in their image to save them. We will have an unfree country, ruled by fear, and if we do not act we will bear some of the blame.”

Reporters have a specific task: to gain public trust by showing, as transparently as possible, the process by which they engage in fact-finding and investigating. They must engage with their critics, even as these critics deride journalists as fake news peddlers. There is a direct relationship between media distrust and conspiracy theorizing, which is evident beyond the United States. A 2016 study in Sweden found that half the country gets their news from alternative, heavily partisan sites, and one in five said they don’t trust “traditional media” at all. (The Digital News Report, a yearly publication from the Reuters Institute and Oxford University, found the same thing in 2017: “Amid intensified discussions on the prevalence of fake news, there is concern in Sweden about so-called news avoiders and also right-wing sympathisers deserting news media in favour of so-called alternative media.”) Sweden is also the European country in which the alt-right has most heavily taken root—probably not a coincidence—and where conspiracy theories about immigrants are most visible and virulent. The news that Swedes were avoiding mainstream media was covered triumphantly on the far-right site Breitbart, which is also not a coincidence.

There is much at stake. In Europe, racist conspiracy theorists have tried to grasp at lasting political power. Those in the west—Marine Le Pen and her anti-Semitic dog whistles in France, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders and his racist, Islamophobic rhetoric and alarming white-blond hair helmet—have largely failed, thus far. In Central and Eastern Europe, though, they have often succeeded. In Hungary, the far-right, racist Jobbik party has moved ever closer to the mainstream, and ultra-nationalist groups in Poland are on the rise. In the United States, conspiracy theorists and white nationalists are attempting to breach the political system and there’s no understating the cause for concern.

In the end, though, conspiracy theories are the symptom, not the disease; they are a function of the society in which they breed. The worst conspiracy impulses, it seems, flourish in isolation. That, in a way, is the hardest condition to counter. Across the United States, there is an army of QAnon detectives or Sandy Hook deniers who sit at home, scrolling endlessly, sinking further and further into a construct of lies designed to provoke fear and fury. The bars maintaining their solitude are extremely sturdy; in a country of vast distances and weak social supports and community institutions, we have designed them that way.

Conspiracy theories can lose their draw if we turn to the work of improving the environment in which they grow by creating a more just, equitable, economically secure, and politically representative society. Conspiracism, like the xenophobia and suspicion that grow from the same gnarled roots, is fed by social instability. We will not be a less paranoid country until we are a fairer one. We need genuinely representative elections, better education in science and media literacy, a less moneyed system of democracy, true and permanent government transparency. Banishing some types of conspiracism will also involve grappling with our past, which is replete with actual cover-ups and human rights abuses.

For the moment, though, we must challenge the hypocrisy, contradictions, and opportunism of our better-known conspiracists and call to reason even the most virulent of them, the people who have pointed the fire hose of misinformation most profitably. Days before Hurricane Irma struck Cuba and Florida, Rush Limbaugh opined that news coverage of the storm was hyped up by people bent on pushing the “climate change agenda,” as he called it.

“There is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it,” he told his listeners, alone in his soundproof booth. “You don’t need a hurricane to hit anywhere. All you need is to create the fear and panic accompanied by talk that climate change is causing hurricanes to become more frequent and bigger and more dangerous, and you create the panic, and it’s mission accomplished, agenda advanced.”

As with so many conspiracy peddlers, Limbaugh’s desire to sell lies to his audience was only outmatched by his self-interest. A day after his impassioned denunciation of Hurricane Irma as a hoax tool of a lying government, Limbaugh did something quietly reasonable. He evacuated Florida, steering himself out of the path of the fake storm. Irma made landfall soon after, creating a path of chaos and destruction that was all too real.