Thus conspiracies have changed their form repeatedly over history, even in the relatively young history of the United States. A lot of conspiratorial hysterias in the early days of this country focused on what the historian Kathryn Olmsted in her book Real Enemies calls “alien subversion”: a fear that disaffected outside groups—Jews, Catholics, Freemasons, Mormons—were plotting to seize control for themselves. Sometimes, more rarely, the alien enemy was closer to home, as with the Salem witch trials, when a community turned on itself, neighbor accusing neighbor of serving the Devil in secret.

But as Olmsted points out, something significant changed in the twentieth century. Theories began to focus not on an outside, alien group seizing power, but on the existing power structure, the government itself; the Romans redirecting their attention back to Nero, as it were.

“No longer were conspiracy theorists chiefly concerned that alien forces were plotting to capture the federal government,” she writes. “Instead, they proposed that the federal government itself was the conspirator. They feared the subversive potential of the swelling, secretive bureaucracies of the proto-national security state.” As the government grew larger, particularly its military element, the number of conspiratorial ideas about it expanded proportionally. And some of those suspicions weren’t unfounded: the country has innumerable examples of actual government conspiracies, which became more outlandish and horrifying as we approached the present day.

In 1954, the CIA directly assisted in overthrowing Guatemala’s president, Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, in large part to protect the interests of the American-owned United Fruit Company. In 1973, the agency did the same in Chile, to destabilize and drive out of power Salvador Allende, the country’s democratically elected Socialist leader.

In the 1960s, the federal government engaged in systematic covert harassment of such activist groups as the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement, and of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, conspiring to ruin the lives of their leaders, set the membership against one another and against other activist groups with whom they might have formed ties, and drive them to despair, ruin, and suicide. The feds also engaged in long-term secret programs to test the effects of radiation on poor people, carrying out medical experiments that sickened and sometimes killed women, prisoners, and even children in state care.

Beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the 1990s, investigative journalism, along with declassified FBI and CIA files, revealed a series of appalling secret government programs. To pick just one: in MKUltra, the CIA and the army explored the use of mescaline and LSD by dosing unwitting civilians, including mental patients, prisoners, and johns visiting sex workers at covert CIA-run brothels. The records of that program were deliberately destroyed by the government in 1973.

But all those plots were, in the end, exposed, as were Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the NSA’s spying on Americans. Antigovernment conspiracy theorists tend to overestimate the ability of bureaucrats to scheme in secret. Grand conspiracies are hard to conceal. Yet it’s not unreasonable—at all, even a little bit—to believe that the government is still engaged in nefarious and secretive behavior, because we know that it has done so in the past. Timothy Melley, an English professor at Miami University, has written in recent years about the growth and alarming secrecy of the national security apparatus, which we glimpse through redacted FOIAs and anonymous whistleblowers, and reflect back onto ourselves in the form of TV shows like Homeland and House of Cards.

“Twenty-five years after the end of the cold war, the U.S. has 17 intelligence agencies employing hundreds of thousands of workers at a cost of some $70 billion per year,” Melley wrote in the New York Times in 2015. “But most of our ideas about U.S. intelligence work come from the endless stream of melodramatic entertainment in movies and on TV. The public thus finds itself in a strange state of half-knowledge about U.S. foreign affairs. When ‘top secrecy’ and ‘plausible deniability’ are widely accepted ideas, is it any surprise that so many people believe political power is wielded by powerful, invisible agents?”

We have found ourselves at a point in history where both real government conspiracies and their shadows loom large in our collective imagination. Those two things, working in tandem, destabilize the public perception of what’s true, what’s possible, and what we’re ready to pin on those running the country. But the problem goes beyond how civilians feel about the government; it also works, more alarmingly, in reverse. There are dozens of examples of feverish conspiracy thinking driving state action, where imaginary enemies and nonexistent plots have led to some extremely dark decisions. President Richard Nixon is our best worst example of this: he was, for one thing, a genuinely paranoid person who kept a long and well-organized enemies list and, in a double whammy of conspiracism, believed Communist-backed plots against him were orchestrated by Jews. That allowed him to justify his own conspiracies: tapping the phones at the DNC headquarters, the Watergate break-in, and bribing the burglary team themselves to stay quiet about their work.

During the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s, too, a fear of Communists infecting the country like termites in wood led to a shameful period of life-ruining witch hunts, hearings, and professional blacklists. (Richard Nixon, then a congressman, enthusiastically joined the House Un-American Activities Committee, which investigated suspected Communist sympathizers, to participate in the persecution.) Or, just a few years before, the incarceration of Japanese Americans in internment camps was based on nothing more than a racist suspicion that they were enemy agents organizing from within against the United States. When, beginning in the 1980s, right-wing extremists started to claim that the government planned to imprison political dissenters in camps run by FEMA, they used the Japanese internment as a reason why the theory was plausible.

More relevant to our own age is yet another phenomenon: politicians who willingly fan the flames of conspiracy either out of genuine belief or because it suits their political ends or some mixture of the two. Hillary Clinton blamed, with a straight face, a “vast right-wing conspiracy” for the women making sexual abuse claims against her husband, the president. The Bush administration infamously claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to justify its invasion of the country. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz enthusiastically promoted the idea that Saddam Hussein, not Osama Bin Laden, was the hidden hand responsible for 9/11. And beginning around 2010, with the rise of the Tea Party, we saw dozens of state and local politicians claim that Muslims were taking over their towns with the canny use of Sharia law. Many of the same politicians, including Republican senator Ted Cruz and now–Texas governor Greg Abbott, also claimed repeatedly that the United Nations had developed plots called Agenda 21 and Jade Helm, designed to invade the United States and take our guns. Whether they believed such things to be true (they weren’t), the claims served as useful focal points for organizing their supporters.

With the arrival of Trump, politicians have also—in a twist reminiscent of Nixon conspiring against the imaginary enemies he feared—taken to generating what they themselves have scornfully termed “fake news.” The Trump administration launched its own weekly news service on social media in 2017, dedicated entirely to positive coverage of the president. The same year, the Associated Press discovered that the Republican Governors Association created what looked a whole lot like a website for a news outlet: it was called The Free Telegraph and it shared positive news about—you guessed it—Republican governors, alongside negative headlines about Democrats. Until the AP started asking questions, the site did not disclose who was behind it.

Even in the United States, which, as we have seen, is a perfect petri dish for conspiratorial thinking, not everybody buys into every theory equally. Fairly common beliefs—that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone in killing JFK, or that the government is hiding its knowledge of aliens—aren’t shared by everyone.

One persistent question is why some people go further into conspiracy thinking than others. There are clearly psychological, cultural, emotional, and circumstantial elements at work and, predictably, a mess of slightly conflicting studies to tell us how much weight to lend to each. There is some balance here of nature versus nurture: at least seven different studies between 2011 and the present have looked at the idea that people can be predisposed to conspiracy theorizing.

Some people might indeed have a stronger innate tendency toward conspiracy thinking. A 2016 paper, also coauthored by Joseph Uscinski, explains that predisposition seems increasingly likely to be a real phenomenon, a mixture of “political socialization” and psychological factors.

As with many things, we tend to believe in the conspiracy theories we want to believe, drawn to the ones that satisfy and reinforce our view of how the world works. Researchers have linked that to a concept called motivated reasoning: we tend to give more weight to studies, news articles, and any other form of information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs and values, and find ways to reject things that don’t line up with what we feel to be true, what talk show host Stephen Colbert memorably called “truthiness.” Studies on motivated reasoning from both the early 1990s and 2000s show the same patterns: we’re not particularly receptive to information that makes us feel defensive or attacked about our existing values or beliefs.

“When individuals engage in motivated reasoning,” two professors from Appalachian State University wrote in a 2012 study, “partisan goals trump accuracy goals.” They found that people would act as “biased information processors who will vigorously defend their prior values, identities, and attitudes at the expense of factual accuracy.”

Uscinski and Parent, the Florida academics, have studied another clear example of motivated reasoning: their research indicates that the conspiracies you believe in tend to line up with your political beliefs. (In a 2017 YouGov poll, years after the birther conspiracy theory should have been dead and firmly buried, 51 percent of Republicans said they thought former president Obama was born in Kenya. People who voted for Donald Trump were particularly likely to believe it: a full 57 percent of them said it was “definitely” or “probably” true. Just 14 percent of Democrats believed that racist, repeatedly debunked lie.)

The one thing Americans have in common, though, is our profound, widespread suspicion. In 2014, Uscinski and Parent published American Conspiracy Theories, which presents the results of years of research and makes a pretty persuasive case that nobody in this country is not a conspiracy theorist, at least to some degree.

“Conspiracy theories permeate all parts of American society,” they wrote, “and cut across gender, age, race, income, political affiliation, educational level, and occupational status.” Some beliefs crossed class and political lines: between 60 and 80 percent of people surveyed agreed that the Kennedy assassination was part of a conspiracy that was covered up by the government. Others, surprising ones, were closely tied to party: the conviction that climate change is a government hoax is more common on the right, while suspicions about GMOs are more common on the left.

Uscinski and Parent’s research revealed that people who believe in one conspiracy theory are likely to believe in others, a kind of domino effect of the mind. This isn’t a new result: a much smaller survey in 1994 showed a similar pattern. Ted Goertzel at Rutgers University surveyed 348 people in New Jersey, finding that most of them classified at least one of ten conspiracy theories as “probably” true. Fascinatingly, other studies show that people are able to believe in multiple conspiracy theories even when they’re logically contradictory: in my reporting, for example, I’ve seen people claim that both vaccines and a weed killer called Roundup are responsible for increased autism rates. (In an attempt to split the difference, some folks say that Roundup somehow made its way into the vaccines.)

Finally, a word about the term “conspiracy theory” itself. Taken on its own, the phrase doesn’t necessarily pronounce whether the theories themselves are true or false. But there’s no doubt that it has taken on a negative cast, evoking a frenzied paranoiac sitting in a basement before a wall of illegible, scribbled notes, his protective tinfoil hat firmly clamped onto his head. Some of that impression comes from Hofstadter, whose essay is incessantly cited and used, in my experience, to promote a mocking and unsympathetic view of people who buy into conspiratorial ideas.

If you were paranoid, you might think there is something at work in the use of the term “conspiracy theory.” Something sinister, perhaps? Most academics agree that the term came into academic use in the 1950s and entered the popular lexicon in the 1960s, although Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945, uses it ten separate times. According to Robert Blaskiewicz of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, there are instances of the phrase being used as far back as 1870, and in 1890 and 1909 it appeared in popular periodicals, medical texts, and the Oxford English Dictionary.

But if you spend any time at all in this conspiracy world, you will hear that the term itself was created by the CIA to discredit people who get too close to the truth. The notion was promoted most prominently by Lance deHaven-Smith of Florida State University, who in a 2013 book proposed that the CIA came up with the phrase to undermine anyone who questioned the official story of the Kennedy assassination. It was part of what he called “a whisper campaign against critics of the Warren Commission,” whose investigation JFK truthers have found unsatisfactory and obfuscatory for decades. DeHaven-Smith and others point to a batch of Warren Commission documents released to the New York Times under a FOIA request in 1976. A CIA memo included in the documents showed that the agency was indeed concerned with alternate theories of the assassination, and with “countering and discrediting them,” it said, “so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries.”

hough the term was used long before he claims it was, there’s still some degree of truth to deHaven-Smith’s premise, according to Kathryn Olmsted. Public officials began adopting the term only “on a regular basis in the late ’60s in reference to the Kennedy assassination,” she said. “There might have been isolated incidents before then, but it wasn’t widespread.”

To this day, calling someone a conspiracy theorist remains a fast way to offend them and, as a journalist, confirm that you’re part of the biased lamestream sheeple media planning a hit job on ideas they hold dear. I used the term on Twitter. That was a bad idea in that it led to the bizarre experience of being attacked for the contents of this book well before most of it existed. “At least we’re trying to get to the truth,” wrote one guy, the proprietor of a series of minor-league conspiracy-oriented websites as well as a clothing line of conspiracy T-shirts, modeled by pantless women. He sent increasingly outraged messages on every social media platform known to humans, imploring me to look beyond whatever my handlers/backers/government masters had told me to find.

“If there is fundamentally underlying foundations of information that the public believes to be true, I do not expect you to understand the cult that you may be a part of,” he wrote, a little confusingly. “Science has turned into science fiction, history has been re-figured and you make fun of the people trying to heal. I believe in fair criticism, but find nearly only incredibly disingenuous hit pieces from the MSM sources you’re connected with. They wouldn’t run the pieces if you weren’t making fun of us, but I’m seriously interested how far you are willing to deny some of the things you have researched.”

This is a popular view: they will let me write about conspiracy theorists only if I make fun of them; the mainstream media and my handlers are all engaged in stigmatizing and discrediting people who get too close to the truth. People in the very deep end of the conspiracy pool have a Sisyphean view of themselves, perpetually rolling a boulder of truth up a hill, only to have the spiteful masses shove it back down again. One woman, named Raquel, a sixty-one-year-old Holocaust denier living in the Southwest, became a more-or-less friendly Twitter correspondent; she wanted to make sure I wasn’t writing about “stupid conspiracies” or dismissing evidence out of hand.

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” she told me, much of it government-produced. Raquel also had theories about September 11, JFK, and the killing of his brother Robert F. Kennedy, but her main thing was the Holocaust; she was polite even after I let her know that I am Jewish and believe quite firmly that it happened. Raquel was at pains to show that conspiracism doesn’t have to amount to pessimism or despair or inaction; she’d even come up with a scheme to save humanity. “My plan to save the world was to abolish money, law and the state boundaries,” she wrote. That didn’t work; she makes a living these days in a business connected to tax liens.

Conspiracy theorists prefer other descriptions, such as researchers, independent journalists, or seekers. A popular variant is members of the “truth community” or the “research community.” And the truth community in the United States is very, very large, a size that is reflected in the rich ecosystem of conspiracy-centric “alternative” news that attracts significant audiences. Conspiracy theories became a hot product even more directly marketable with the rise of talk radio and more recently with YouTube, which has become a haven for armies of would-be Alex Joneses, pushing every conceivable narrative angle possible in winding videos for audiences that sometimes reach into the millions.

Between talk radio and YouTube, e-fields of conspiracy-peddling websites and message boards have sprouted: Before It’s News, Godlike Productions, corners of Reddit, The Conservative Treehouse, and WorldNetDaily, one of the very oldest conspiracy outlets, that’s been able to keep a surprisingly loyal audience for a very long time. WND was founded twenty years ago by Joseph Farah, who wanted to make news from a “Judeo-Christian perspective.” He envisaged WND serving the same function as any other news service: “The idea for WND was to return to what had once been the ‘central role of a free press,’ serving as a watchdog on government and other powerful institutions,” Farah said.

In that watchdog role, WND spread stories about Obama’s foreign birth, FEMA camps, and any number of other questionable ideas. Farah argues, though, that he’s not the one making stuff up. “I deplore fake news,” he wrote to me, “which is a real phenomenon in what you would call ‘mainstream’ sources like CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as in the news media.” He didn’t consider that he himself promoted conspiracy theories—despite absolutely, definitively promoting conspiracy theories.

“Sometimes, they turn out to be right,” he insisted.

The problem isn’t that conspiracy theories are worse today than in the past, since they have more or less always been with us, waxing and waning in visibility through the decades. For their book, for instance, Uscinski and Parent analyzed a randomly selected 104,803 letters sent by readers to the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune between 1890 and 2010. They found evidence that conspiracy theories fluctuated in response to times of enormous social upheaval—the first spike was right around the year 1900, during a great acceleration of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization.

The issue, then, isn’t the conspiracy theories themselves, which any healthy societal discourse can absorb; we’ve done so for generations, treating them as a natural and understandable outgrowth of social upheaval and (very) spirited public discussion. The real problem is that an ever-more-efficient conspiracy-information machine has coincided with a very real resurgence in nationalism and white supremacy. We’re seeing unholy and shifting alliances of fellow travelers: conspiracy-oriented news sources, white supremacist groups, and so-called alt-right rising stars (generally, people who are willing to espouse nationalism and denounce political correctness but don’t like being called Nazis) are all feeding into one another. They share tactics, interview one another, signal-boost one another on social media, and create a cacophonous, self-reinforcing ecology.

The worst corner of this flourishing conspiracy culture amounts to a deeply regressive view of the world. It denounces immigrants as the advance army of some hidden globalist agenda. It calls Black Lives Matter activists liars and Soros-paid actors, while the victims of mass shootings and their grieving families are condemned as fakes. It confidently announces, as happened in July 2018, that liberals are planning to spring a “Second Civil War” on the country, attacking unsuspecting conservatives as they sleep. (The liberals apparently didn’t quite get it together in time to strike, and the much-vaunted war didn’t happen.)

And many of the biggest players are virulently sexist: Alex Jones denounced feminism as a globalist plot. Mike Cernovich, a juice-diet-peddling fitness blogger turned men’s rights activist who ultimately morphed into one of the bigger conspiracy peddlers in the country, wrote several blog posts on how to coerce unwilling women into sex. He has argued that “date rape doesn’t exist” and that men are the victims of a society-wide smear campaign: “Every man is under attack,” he once wrote. “Everyone from school teachers, preachers, and media figures tell men we are garbage. We are privileged. We are sinners. We are potential rapists. Resisting the brainwashing takes an act of will.”

The figure uniting these disparate groups—the white supremacists, the sexists, the die-hard nationalists—is Donald Trump. He legitimized certain conspiracy theories and theorists in a way that would have been unimaginable before the 2016 election, making “rigged elections” and the Deep State broad subjects of discussion. And nobody since Nixon has better embodied the concept of projection when it comes to conspiracy theories: the Trump campaign has, from the beginning, been dogged by allegations of a literal conspiracy with Russian governmental agents. Trump’s brand of wild accusations and a new enemy to target every week looks, in this light, like a very familiar image, a classic defensive dodge of long standing.

But conspiracism won’t die when the Trump era ends; it will persist and grow stronger, in large part because of our social stratification, our sense of disenfranchisement from the political system, our low trust in what we now derisively term the “mainstream media.” An April 2017 Harvard-Harris poll found that a full 65 percent of voters believe “there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media,” including 80 percent of Republicans, 60 percent of Independents, and 53 percent of Democrats. Eighty-four percent of voters said it’s “hard to know what news to believe online.” The problem is not limited to the United States: A twenty-eight-country survey released in January 2018 found that twice as many people said they distrusted the media as trusted it, and many reported they were cutting back on news entirely. An erosion of faith in institutions, including media outlets, is global.

We’ve always been afraid of each other, fearful of the intentions of our neighbors, our government, our media. Some of us are especially prone to seeing ourselves as forces of good, fighting against whatever evil entities are trying to destroy society or religion. Conspiracy theorizing is part of the free exchange of ideas; suggestions that the government crack down on conspiracy thinking have been disastrous and inevitably given rise to new conspiracy theories.

And there’s something else resurgent in recent years: conspiracy thinking isn’t just for the politically disaffected, the powerless looking to make sense of their position on the social scale. We’re seeing conspiracy theories wielded by the strong against the weak, by those in power against those without any. At the same time, politicians now accuse their opponents of being conspiracy theorists, of trafficking in “hysterical” and baseless ideas, even as they deploy similar thinking when it suits them (as in the concept of the Deep State).

Elsewhere, some precincts of conspiracy culture have reached a new scale: monetized, commercialized, and weaponized. There are more and more “conspiracy entrepreneurs”—as Harvard researchers Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule have dubbed them—an army of people created by Twitter and Facebook and YouTube who make a living selling a heady blend of suspicion, hoaxes, and misinformation. Alex Jones and InfoWars is just the largest, most financially lucrative example, but there are thousands of others. They write blogs, teach seminars, promise quick-fix financial and legal packets, and sell nutritional supplements and other magical products meant to counteract the malicious effects of whatever “they” are doing to us.

Conspiracy theorists don’t just gather to dissect the moon landing or the JFK assassination. They are deeply enmeshed in global politics, as they have been periodically throughout world history, sometimes to our serious universal detriment. To focus on just one strain of conspiracism, the anti-Semitic kind, think of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the caricature of Jews as world-controlling “global bankers,” or Holocaust denial: all are based on the ideas of Jews as secret manipulators of the levers of power.

There is evidence that some disinformation peddlers are influenced and fed information by governments that find them useful. The American alt-right participated enthusiastically in the dissemination of the Macron Leaks, a set of partly real, partly forged documents released to sway the French elections and put the nationalist anti-Semite Marine Le Pen in power. (Le Pen has long toyed with conspiracy ideas to sway her base. She’s declared that the “enemy of the French people” is “the world of finance,” echoing Jewish-banker stereotypes that still have a powerful hold in France.) The Macron Leaks failed to have any real impact on French voters: Le Pen was resoundingly defeated, but her party, the National Front, remains a legitimate force.

Around the same time, sites such as InfoWars and Before It’s News called chemical attacks in Syria into question, atrocities that were perpetrated by Bashar al-Assad’s regime and which killed thousands of civilians. Both sites suggested the White Helmets, a volunteer civilian emergency-search-and-rescue organization, had carried out the chemical attacks. Those allegations, which were repeated by the Assad regime and Russian-sponsored media, served one purpose: to create doubt or plausible deniability for the Syrian regime against charges of mass murder.

Global conspiratorial propaganda efforts also reached the United States: Russian intelligence agencies created pages for fake activist groups on Facebook and Tumblr, for example, designed to exploit and exacerbate tensions over police shootings of unarmed black citizens, gun control, and other hot-button issues.

Further, it became clear in 2017 that people serving in the Trump administration were feeding information to far-right news outlets. People such as once-marginal figure Mike Cernovich suddenly broke news that could have been acquired only via someone in the White House. The effect is twofold: a fringe figure becomes more credible, and, more fundamentally, uncertainty proliferates about what is true, who is trustworthy, who should be listened to. That uncertainty benefits the reigning power structure and serves to deepen distrust of all blogs, newspapers, and TV stations—the mainstream media the administration so vocally detests.

Our current conspiracy culture, then, is deeply entwined with the promotion of a radically right-wing and socially regressive worldview, one that elevates strongmen like Assad and Vladimir Putin to venerated positions and advances cherished conservative goals. Denying the death of mass shooting victims serves the gun lobby; denying Assad’s chemical warfare supports a set of geopolitical interests; denying that rape and assault exist, are common, and that victims should be believed strengthens a retrograde, sexist culture. In nearly every case, contemporary conspiracy theories aren’t random offshoots emerging spontaneously. They are politically useful.

The surge in the prominence of conspiracy sellers and the variety of wares they peddle shows they are a market that’s been quietly building itself on the edges of society for decades. It should be no surprise, in the end, that it ultimately broke into the mainstream. The result is a chaotic wonderland where every conspiracy idea, no matter how long dead, dormant, or ridiculous, has a chance to return and flourish. The past couple of years have seen a resurgence of discredited medical treatments—like using apricot pits to cure cancer, or bleach enemas to treat autism—and old hoaxes, such as, again, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. At the same time, our trust in institutions and experts and authority figures—media, government, scientists—hovers at a historic low. No one can be trusted. Everything and every possibility is equally plausible. We no longer have a common set of facts on which to agree, not even the shape of the Earth. That amounts to a power vacuum, which creates an opportunity for someone—or many someones—to seize control and promote their own narratives and their own truths.

In the case of Black Lives Matter, the FBI engaged in a pattern of surveillance. In 2015, the agency used secret spy planes to film a large-scale protest in Baltimore waged in response to the death of a young black man, Freddie Gray, in police custody. The same planes were used to surveil protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the death of Michael Brown, also an African American. Buzzfeed News reported that the FBI deployed secret spy planes some thirty-five hundred times in the second half of 2015. The FBI defended the legality of aerial surveillance, insisting that they weren’t gathering footage of particular peaceful activists, but instead using planes to follow “terrorists, spies and serious criminals,” per a statement by agency deputy director Mark Giuliano.

Sometimes the agency is more pointed: ahead of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, per the Washington Post, at least six Black Lives Matter activists said they were contacted by the FBI and essentially warned not to come to the city to protest. The FBI characterized the calls and in-person visits as “community outreach.” The FBI also directly contacted at least three people involved in the opposition at Standing Rock; all three people, according to reporting from the Guardian, asserted their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and would not respond to the agents’ requests to talk, fearing they were trying to build a criminal case. Red Fawn Fallis, a water protector at Standing Rock, was arrested in October 2016 and charged with firing a gun belonging to her romantic partner, who was, as The Intercept reported, an FBI informant. (The informant, Heath Harmon, told investigators he was hired by the FBI to “observe” the Standing Rock movement, though there is no evidence that he induced Fallis to fire his gun; she fired three shots after being tackled and pinned down by law enforcement officers during a protest, hitting no one.)

State conspiracies involving minority communities have not been limited only to surveillance or disinformation. In the mid-twentieth century, respected national health agencies and institutions saw fit to operate and experiment on ordinary citizens who were too ill-informed, powerless, or poor to resist. Their unwitting subjects included convicts, the mentally ill, and even children in orphanages. In each case, the people disproportionately affected were black; nearly as often, they were Latinx or Native American.

One of the best known of these genuine conspiracies against people of color was forced sterilization, which took place in thirty-two states for most of the twentieth century, with funding from the federal government. In 1907, Indiana passed a law making it legal to sterilize the “feeble-minded,” a law that California copied two years later, followed by a cascade of other states in what were usually dubbed “asexualization acts.” This system of eugenics—which Hitler vocally admired and would later copy—targeted other undesirables, too.

Some women unknowingly had their reproductive organs removed during C-sections or were threatened with losing their welfare benefits if they didn’t accept sterilization. Medical students in southern states carried out what became known as “Mississippi appendectomies,” unnecessarily sterilizing mostly black women without their knowledge as a routine part of their training. In California alone, more than twenty thousand people had forced hysterectomies or vasectomies, and the procedure was banned outright only in 1979.

These practices have a long and disturbing half-life. The Urban Indian Health Institute found in 2010 that American Indian and Alaska Native women have higher rates of sterilization than white women, adding that more study would be required to tell them exactly why. The UIHI speculated that it was possible that some of the women surveyed had been “directly affected” by coercive sterilization practices, in which women may have been subject to “harassment or deceit” to get them to agree to the procedure.

The ostensibly voluntary sterilization of prisoners hasn’t ceased altogether, either. In 2017, Tennessee judge Sam Benningfield ignited a firestorm of controversy when it was revealed that he offered to reduce inmates’ sentences by thirty days if they agreed to a vasectomy or a contraceptive implant. (Curiously, he offered just two days’ good time in exchange for taking a class on neonatal development and substance abuse.) The ACLU of Tennessee objected to the practice and pointed out its echoes of the forced sterilization acts of the past; Benningfield responded by saying he hoped to help inmates “get on their feet and make something of themselves.”

Then there was the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which hundreds of black men with syphilis in rural Alabama were intentionally left untreated to track the progress of the disease. The experiment ran from 1932 to 1972, continuing after syphilis was found to be treatable with penicillin in 1945. The Tuskegee victims didn’t see justice until a 1973 class-action lawsuit and a subsequent out-of-court settlement awarded them $10 million. The federal government was also forced to establish a medical care program for Tuskegee survivors, as well as for their wives, widows, and offspring. Even then, nobody apologized for Tuskegee until President Bill Clinton did so formally in 1997. The notoriety of the program spurred a host of ethical reforms in how researchers are legally required to deal with human subjects.

Among black communities, Tuskegee became a byword for medical experimentation, neglect, and conspiracy—a particular betrayal that stands for the universal experience. It is not surprising that a history of enslavement, lynching, segregation, surveillance—along with unequal access to housing, education, and jobs—has produced a relationship of distrust between black Americans and their government.

To Dr. John L. Jackson, the dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, Uscinski and Parent’s claim that black communities are growing less conspiratorial seemed like wishful thinking. A cultural anthropologist, Jackson has spent a lot of time around conspiracy-leaning black communities across the United States and in Israel (where he studied the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, a group of polygamous vegans who have thought deeply about ways to achieve eternal life). Jackson’s rebuttal of Uscinski and Parent’s theory is all of one word: Obama.

“The way African Americans read the eight years of Obama is as this unrelenting and unfair demonization of an otherwise squeaky-clean president,” he says. “It almost feels for a lot of folks like it’s the quintessential example of the impossibility of being accepted. If Obama didn’t have any serious skeletons, yet could be so roundly demonized, the idea is that no one else has a chance.”

The most egregious attack on President Obama was itself a conspiracy theory: birtherism, in which a whole lot of people, including the president who followed him, argued that Obama was a secret Kenyan Muslim who had stolen the presidency. It was the most literal (and racist) expression of the idea that an alien force had taken control of the country. Republican congressman Bill Posey even proposed legislation that candidates for president have to include their birth certificate with their filing materials. The birther claims became so loud—due in part to their enthusiastic promotion by Donald Trump—that Obama eventually held a press conference to release his long-form birth certificate.

Birtherism wasn’t the only conspiracy theory surrounding Obama’s presidency. At his inauguration, Chief Justice John Roberts bungled a few words of the oath of office, which prompted claims that Obama wasn’t really president. (Roberts and Obama quickly staged a do-over, just to be on the safe side.)

Beyond the treatment of Obama, Jackson argues that even non-conspiracist black Americans are still aware of the outlines of the most popular suspicions. “There’s two or three degrees of separation between a non-conspiracy theorist and conspiracy theorist in black America,” he says. “Folks will at least be cognizant of what the claims are. Folks are trafficking in the discourse and know it enough.” And, he adds, “There are moments, even fleetingly, when something happens in the news or an inexplicable occurrence and they’re willing to give a head-nod” to some conspiratorial ideas.

The reasons are fairly obvious. “Folks can draw on some pretty significant historical precedents for racialized conspiracies,” Jackson noted. Being black in this country comes with a “cultural sensibility that says you have to be cautious.” Those precedents explain “all the deep-seated distrust of the medical establishment and criminal justice system. There are ways that folks don’t believe that mainstream American society has the best interest of black people at heart. That’s not a cockamamie thing.” In an interview with Vice, rapper Bun B echoed Jackson’s view, saying that conspiracy thinking is the result of questioning American history. “If you think of ten things that seem strange and then find evidence for four of them, you start to question the other six,” he said. “When people say, ‘This is a result of systematic oppression of entire races of people’ and then you look at the Tuskegee experiments, you look at Guantanamo Bay, it does give you pause about blindly assuming certain things.”

Some groups seek to take advantage of that suspicion, like the Moorish Nation or the Washitaw Nation based in Louisiana, which claims Native American origins and tries to gain tribal rights, usually without success. Most notably there’s the Nation of Islam, the black separatist group. In the 1950s and 1960s, its leader, Elijah Muhammad, warned repeatedly against vaccines and other forms of mainstream medical care like birth control, which he called a depopulation scheme and a “death plan.” To this day, NOI members are instructed to give their doctors an exemption letter to keep them from mandatory vaccines.

The distrust of vaccines has continued and expanded. In 2015, the NOI teamed up with the larger, mostly white anti-vaccine movement to encourage black families to refuse to vaccinate their children. One California NOI leader, Tony Muhammad, was convinced there is a CDC cover-up of the vaccine-autism connection after meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Vaccines are a depopulation scheme, he believes, both in the United States and in African countries. “We are a target,” he told me. “The world can go to hell. Black people are a target and it’s a shame nobody wants to admit it.”

Muhammad’s specific claims—that Bill Gates is funding the depopulation effort in Africa through his foundation’s vaccine work there—are not remotely true, but his underlying logic was tough to argue with. “We have a reason to be suspicious,” he said. “Until that situation is handled, I don’t trust the government. I don’t trust pharmaceutical companies to do their own studies, just like I don’t trust police departments to do their own internal investigations.… It’s all the same.”

Others against vaccines—like white conspiracist Mike Adams, the self-appointed Health Ranger—repeat the claims about vaccines and public-health programs in Africa to amplify their U.S. campaign, in the process reinforcing the idea that black people have been targeted for death. In November 2017, Adams sent out an email blast claiming that a recent plague outbreak in ten East African countries was not what it seemed. “Evidence is mounting that the plague outbreak in Africa may be a weaponized depopulation program,” Adams wrote. “Globalists everywhere are freaking out over the population explosion across Africa, with over 3 million new African babies born each month. Those same globalists are now calling for urgent action to reduce the population across Africa. The plague, it turns out, is the easiest way for them to accomplish that.”

Besides vaccines, AIDS conspiracism has also taken deep root in black America. The most common theory is that the CIA created HIV and AIDS in a lab to wipe out black and gay people. (The agency has also been repeatedly accused of dumping heroin and crack in black neighborhoods to prompt addiction and ensnarement in the criminal justice system.) The CIA-AIDS narrative was furthered by a KGB disinformation campaign in the 1980s, Operation INFEKTION, part of the KGB’s so-called active measures of disinformation. KGB agents spread the rumor that AIDS was created as a biological weapon in a lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. The allegations first appeared in a pro-Soviet newspaper in India in 1983, and spread all over the world by 1987; an even more pernicious version of the lie alleged that the virus was spread through “AIDS-oiled condoms,” potentially discouraging people from using methods of safer sex. In 1992, the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Yevgeny Primakov, acknowledged the KGB had created and advanced those rumors.

The belief that AIDS was created to destroy black communities became widespread in various African countries, too: Zimbabwe’s former president Robert Mugabe once described AIDS as a “white man’s plot.” In 2004, Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan biologist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, called AIDS a biological weapon created to “wipe out the black race.” The disease is “not a curse from God to Africans or the black people,” she told a group in Nyeri, Kenya. “It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists, but we may not know who particularly did” it.

Once again, actual historical conspiracies lend credibility to claims that would otherwise be considered outrageous. “The conspiracy about AIDS is no more or less unbelievable than the Tuskegee experiment,” Michael Harriot, a journalist for The Root, pointed out to me.

In 2005, a study published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes found that 53 percent of African Americans surveyed said they believed the government was withholding a cure for AIDS from poor people; 27 percent thought AIDS was produced in a government lab; 48 percent called HIV a “man-made virus.” However, more intentional conspiracy theories were less common: just 15 percent called AIDS a form of genocide against black people, and only 16 percent said the government created AIDS to control the black population.

But AIDS conspiracy theories are particularly dangerous in that they can lead directly to unsafe sex. The 2005 study found that black men who held conspiratorial beliefs about AIDS were less likely to use safer sex practices. The more a man supported one of these theories, the less likely he was to use a condom. (Women didn’t show that tendency.) The researchers also suggested that for men who didn’t particularly want to wear a condom in the first place, the conspiracy theories helped serve as justification for declining to slip one on.

AIDS conspiracies in black America are so entrenched that one researcher, Jacob Heller, found people in focus groups making virtually the same claims in 2012 as were made in 1992. “To find a rumor faithfully repeated after two decades demonstrates remarkable durability,” he wrote. Heller pointed out that even respected celebrities repeated beliefs in conspiracy theories, sometimes intentionally and sometimes perhaps not: comedian Bill Cosby, in 1991, and actor Will Smith, in 1999, both suggested HIV could have been manmade, while Obama’s onetime preacher, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, stated it outright. “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color,” he roared during a 2003 sermon. “Governments lie!”

Wright repeated those claims in a 2008 appearance at the National Press Club. “Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.” (Around then, Wright became such a headache for Obama that the future president denounced his views and cut ties with him. The following year, Wright told an interviewer he hadn’t talked to Obama in some time: “Them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck, or in eight years when he’s out of office.”)

Beyond medical fears, recent conspiracy theories in black America have focused on the suspicion that the white establishment will cut down any black leader who threatens the status quo. During his confirmation hearings in 1991, future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas thus explained accusations of having sexually harassed Anita Hill, a female subordinate. Thomas told then-senator Joe Biden that the whole thing was a setup, testifying that “someone, some interest group came up with this story” to discredit him. Other people called Hill a “pawn” for some shadowy white cabal focused on destroying a black man before he could rise to power. (The fact that Hill herself was black was somehow elided from the discussion.)

Virtually the same narrative played out in 2015, when accusations mounted against Bill Cosby for what ended up as more than sixty allegations of sexual assault. Cosby eventually stood trial for his alleged crimes against a single accuser, Andrea Constand, and, after a mistrial, was found guilty the second time around. But the Cosby truthers—easily findable on YouTube and Twitter—opined that the allegations were revenge for Cosby having tried to buy NBC in the mid-1990s. “The world really fears black power!” one person wrote in a typical tweet. “Like the Bill Cosby shit and him trying to buy NBC then all of a sudden that rape shit came out.” Even Phylicia Rashad, who played Cosby’s wife, Clair Huxtable, got in on it. “What you’re seeing is the destruction of a legacy,” she told Showbiz 411 blogger Roger Friedman in 2015. “And I think it’s orchestrated.” Someone, she added, “is determined to keep Bill Cosby off TV. And it’s worked.”

The assumption that white America will respond violently to black economic power is, of course, rooted in reality. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the early 1900s, a neighborhood called Greenwood became known as the Black Wall Street; it was thriving thanks to the discovery of oil. In 1921, the area’s white occupants decided they could no longer endure the sight of financially independent black people. In a horrifying massacre, they used private planes to firebomb the neighborhood’s buildings, then killed the fleeing residents with machine guns. More than thirty-five city blocks were leveled, eight hundred people were hospitalized, and at least six thousand people were detained. The National Guard declared thirty people dead, but the Red Cross put the real number at more than three hundred. Even today, the incident is often referred to as the Tulsa Race Riots, suggesting an equal fight between two equally culpable sides.

Every shocking incident in the history of black America has thus paved the way for a related conspiracy theory alive today. The very real government violence against black activist groups in the 1960s—such as the killing of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by the FBI and Chicago police—implanted fear that the state is not above doing the same thing to contemporary activists. Those concerns were urgently heightened after three Black Lives Matter activists from Ferguson, Missouri, were killed in similar ways: Deandre Joshua was found dead in his car in 2014, as were Darren Seals in 2016 and Edward Crawford in 2017. Both Seals’s and Joshua’s cars had also been lit on fire; local authorities said Crawford’s death looked like either an accident or a suicide.

Missouri state senator Maria Chapelle-Nadal, who represents Ferguson, found the deaths troubling. She addressed Crawford’s death on the Missouri Senate floor: “I found out this morning another young man from my district died in the same fashion as two or three other people who were active in Ferguson,” she said. “The people who were murdered at this point, they were all people who have been seen prominently in the media.” In an interview with The Root, she suggested that local militia groups could have targeted the men. And Root columnist Jason Johnson wrote that, at the very least, the killings needed a more serious investigation than he suspected the Ferguson police had given them.

“It is possible to believe that Crawford’s death was just an accident,” Johnson wrote. “It is possible to believe that he decided to take his own life in full view of other people in the car.” (According to a police statement, two witnesses who were in the car with him told police that Crawford was “distraught over personal matters relating to witnesses,” rummaged in the backseat, and shot himself in the head in front of them.) “It is also possible,” Johnson wrote, “in a town where police claimed that 19-year-old Michael Brown punched out a cop and then charged into a hail of bullets from 30 feet away in broad daylight, that police could be completely lying to cover up some more nefarious cause of death.” He added, “There is a long history in America of the police jumping to the conclusion that everything, from shootings to hangings of black people, is a suicide so as not to tug too hard on the strings of violent white supremacy that hold communities together.”

Conspiratorial thinking also furnished an explanation for killings in Flint, Michigan, where a mostly black populace was exposed to staggering levels of lead in their drinking water beginning in 2014, when the city started sourcing its water from the Flint River without properly treating it. City and state officials denied there was a problem well after Flint residents began to notice that their water smelled, tasted, and looked peculiar. “This is not an emergency,” read a notice from the city sent to residents in July 2015. “If a situation arises where the water is no longer safe to drink, you will be notified within 24 hours.”

It took until December 2015—after a battery of tests from independent organizations showed high lead levels in the water and in children’s blood—for the governor of Michigan to declare a state of emergency, followed by the federal government. In response, residents began suing the city and the state. One of the first was nineteen-year-old Sasha Avonna Bell, who claimed her toddler had contracted lead poisoning. In April 2016, Bell was found shot to death in her home, along with a friend, Sacorya Renee Reed. This came just three days after a Flint water treatment plant foreman named Matthew McFarland was found dead in his own home by a friend.

Natural News, the conspiracy-oriented, increasingly unhinged “natural health” site edited by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, baldly called both deaths a cover-up, indicating that the FBI had killed people to conceal the extent of the water crisis. Adams added, “For those who wonder why, as the editor of Natural News, I carry a loaded weapon with me at all times, consider how often whistleblowers who threaten to expose government conspiracy crimes end up dead.”

But even mainstream outlets like BET struck a conspiratorial note, running with the headline “Something Terrible Happened to the First Person to Sue Flint Over Water,” and saying that Bell’s death was “raising concerns.” Buried in the piece, one sentence noted that “a suspect” had been arrested, namely Bell’s ex-boyfriend Malek Thornton. Thornton pleaded guilty in October 2017 and agreed to testify against a co-defendant, Toron Fisher, who he said came with him to the apartment. McFarland, the water treatment foreman, was later found to have died from drug intoxication combined with hypertension; Natural News didn’t bother to cover those developments other than to call Thornton “obviously a patsy in all this.”

In fact, if you’re not looking for strict accuracy, the best, deepest, weirdest discussion of conspiracies and conspiracy theories in black America is just inches away, with the turn of a radio dial or down a YouTube rabbit hole. Conspiracy theories are prevalent in hip-hop, which makes sense: the genre has functioned as a voice, mirror, and social conscience for African Americans for decades. In 1998, in his song “Channel Zero,” the rapper Canibus gave a breakneck recitation of fifty years of conspiracy theories. The song manages to touch on mind control, brain implants, and all of our presidents being Masons, as well as containing one of the most incredible rhyming couplets in the history of rap and conspiracy writing:

Responsible for launderin’ trillions of dollars from the nation

for the construction of underground military installations

Abductions and cattle mutilations

Experiments on human patients

Can take place in several subterranean bases …

Elsewhere in hip-hop, Chris Brown speculated that Ebola might be used as a biological weapon; in the song “Heard ’Em Say,” Kanye West claims that the government “administered AIDS”; and Snoop Dogg made a video decrying flu shots. “Fuck that, I’m not getting no flu shots ’cause it’s flu season,” he declared, adding that he’d be sticking with honey, oranges, and lemons. “I think they’re shooting some control in you, some shit to take control of you,” he added. “When they have your mind, body, and soul, they going to slow you down a bit. I don’t trust it. I’m cool.” Another rapper, TI, joined the Nation of Islam and began toting Tony Muhammad, the Nation of Islam’s anti-vaccine spokesperson, around with him to radio interviews.

Rap, according to John L. Jackson, is “a medium that can carry conspiracy because it’s operating on multiple levels.” Although Chuck D of Public Enemy called hip-hop “the black CNN,” Jackson cautioned that the lyrics are usually more nuanced than a rookie listener understands. “It’s a way to talk about the real world and experiences that don’t get thematized,” he says, meaning experiences that aren’t often reflected in popular culture or dialogue. “But what that obscures is that hip-hop is also a genre where there’s a surface meaning that can be sometimes easy to grasp, and—because of the dense use of metaphor and how they use vernacular—there can be latent levels of meaning, and if you listen as a casual fan you won’t catch it at all. Embedded all the time is stuff you don’t know unless you’re very initiated.”

The overriding message is that no one could possibly tell black Americans they don’t have the right to reasonable suspicion of the government. (“A right to be hostile,” too, as Public Enemy put it.) Although the distrust can have grave consequences (as with the rejection of AIDS and vaccines), black Americans and other disenfranchised groups see no reason to let their guard down. “A weird thing about being black is some of it is true and some of it is not,” Michael Harriot told me reflectively. “But,” he said, “none of it is crazy.”

In a new wrinkle, we have seen evidence that foreign powers have harnessed this interplay of truth and suspicion among minorities to exploit for their own ends. In a series of stories, the Daily Beast, the New York Times, and Buzzfeed News revealed that the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm, set up fake black and Native activist groups online as part of an apparent effort to stoke division and distrust of the government and each other. During the 2016 elections, Buzzfeed found, the agency backed a website called BlackMattersUS, which positioned itself as a social-justice news site focused “mostly on racism and police brutality.”

The New York Times reported that a number of Russian-backed Facebook pages were dedicated to stoking every minority-related divide in the country. The pages, which used locally produced articles and news segments, focused on black issues or spread anti-Muslim fake stories, such as one that claimed Muslim immigrants in Michigan were living high on the hog on welfare, providing lavishly for themselves and their multiple wives.

The pages had names like Blacktivist and Being Patriotic, and they paid Facebook to sponsor posts, blasting them directly into the newsfeeds of people who were likely to be most receptive to them. Jonathan Albright, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, told the Times that the practice amounted to “cultural hacking.”

The existence of such fake sites confirms one distressing, permanent point: actual government conspiracies have generated a long afterlife. They linger in the collective memory, give rise to new conspiracy theories, and lay out a detailed, easy-to-follow playbook for fomenting further division and distrust.

The federal government has done little to dispel that distrust. In the Trump administration, with Nazi-affiliated and white supremacist groups indisputably on the rise, the Department of Homeland Security gutted funding for Countering Violent Extremism, an Obama-era program that devoted resources to organizations that fight white supremacist groups and help former members leave the movement. At the same time, the FBI has poured more resources into following those whom they label “black identity extremists.”

A leaked memo from the agency written in August 2017 warned that such people might be angry about police officers killing African Americans. “Police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement,” the memo claimed. “And will very likely serve as justification for such violence.” The memo never clearly defined the meaning of “black identity extremism.” Judging by the examples it cited, the category is an unholy mix of lawful protest against police violence, violent acts against police committed by members of such groups as the Moorish Nation, and lone wolves like Micah Johnson, an Army Reserve soldier who returned from Afghanistan and in 2016 killed five police officers in an ambush in Dallas. The FBI claimed that BIEs “proactively target police” and justify their actions with what the agency called “perceived injustices against African Americans, and in some cases, their identified affiliations with violent extremist groups.”

In November 2017, in response to questioning from members of the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Jeff Sessions wouldn’t say whether he considers Black Lives Matter an extremist group. “I’m not able to comment on that,” he told Karen Bass, a black Democratic congresswoman from California. But, he added, “I’m aware that there are groups that do have an extraordinary commitment to their racial identity, and some have even transformed themselves into violent activists.”

Bass asked whether the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis would be identified as “white identity extremists.” Sessions attempted to avoid answering. “I didn’t follow that question,” he responded. Eventually, after a pained few minutes, he admitted the FBI hadn’t produced a report on any white extremist groups.

When Foreign Policy published the leaked memo, one former FBI agent, Michael German—putting wind in the sails of conspiracy theorists everywhere—said plainly that the agency had identified a movement that wasn’t real to justify ramping up enforcement activities.

“Basically,” he said, “it’s black people who scare them.”

Pizzagate adherents break down into a number of subgroups. Among them are survivors of child sexual abuse who know firsthand the pain of that kind of violence. There’s also what I think of as the chaos arm: people like Mike Cernovich, brought in by the alt-right and prone to pushing anti-Democratic conspiracies (and who saw the lack of coverage by the mainstream media as evidence of their having been bought off by the Democrats). And then there are deeply religious Christians, often evangelicals, to whom Pizzagate is proof that the Devil is real and working hard on Earth.

If all this is beginning to sound unpleasantly familiar, it should. Medieval historian Michael Barbezat pointed out that Pizzagate looks a lot like the “nocturnal ritual fantasy,” a phrase coined by Norm Cohn, another historian: a belief that shadowy groups are gathering at night to plot the overthrow of society while participating in the ritual abuse, torture, and/or murder of innocents, usually children. Throughout the Middle Ages, it was popular to charge supposed heretical groups with meeting at night to solidify their bonds of friendship with orgies, black masses, and baby murder. Medieval Jews, Barbezat writes, were persistently accused of conducting rituals involving the abuse of children, beginning in England in the early 1150s.

“The belief that Jews tortured Christian children, which has come to be known as the blood libel, often featured a sexual component as well,” he explains. “In some versions of the blood libel accusation, kidnapped Christian boys were reportedly circumcised against their wills as depicted in a woodcut of the martyrdom of Simon of Trent in 1475. The Jews supposedly used the blood from this circumcision and other tortures to make the matzos for Passover.”

In all such accounts, the nocturnal ritual fantasy is used as justification for violence against the suspected group, Cohn and Barbezat write, a way of quantifying its wickedness in terms that justify any means to stop it. Writer and activist Chip Berlet calls the fantasy “coded rhetoric” meant to incite “scripted violence.” Accordingly, accusations of ritually killing Christian and Muslim children have been used to justify mass executions of Jews across Europe and the Middle East.

Claims of blood libel persisted throughout the twentieth century, intensifying with the 1903 publication of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (the forgery of minutes of a secret meeting of hand-rubbing Jews plotting world domination). The Protocols and the idea of ritual killings or blood libel are cited even now. In 2013, to pluck one disturbing example out of dozens, Khaled Al-Zaafrani, founder of the Egyptian Justice and Progress Party, declared, “It’s well known that during the Passover, they make matzos called the ‘Blood of Zion.’ They take a Christian child, slit his throat, and slaughter him. Then they take his blood and make their matzos. This is a very important rite for the Jews, which they never forgo.… They slice it and fight over who gets to eat Christian blood.” At the Pizzagate rally, then, the neo-Nazi yelling about “Jewish ritual murder” was making a connection between Pizzagate and the blood libel, although he might not have known the historical and cultural roots of what he was doing.

Pizzagate also looks chillingly like a revival of a more local paranoid fantasy, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early 1990s, when dozens of childcare workers, teachers, and parents were accused of engaging in the ritual abuse of children. The panic was partially set off by the publication in 1980 of a book called Michelle Remembers, cowritten by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith, his patient and eventual wife. The book purported to be a chronicle of Smith’s recovered memories of horrific Satanic ritual abuse in the 1950s, and it initiated some two decades of procedures in which self-proclaimed experts guided vulnerable patients through “recovering” similar memories.

Satanic Panic was an irresistible blend of sex, black magic, and crime, and stories about it soon pervaded the culture: huge media outlets from Oprah to 20/20 ran straight-faced stories on Satanic ritual abuse. (Angel had referred to the Oprah episode in our conversation, remembering it as the story of a woman abused by a Satanic cult for generations. I later figured out that the specific episode she was likely referring to recounted the case of a woman named Laurel Rose Wilson, who under the name “Lauren Stratford” claimed to have been used as a “breeder” in a Satanic cult, producing babies for sacrificial rites. Her stories were deemed unfounded by police, investigative journalists, and the Christian magazine Cornerstone, and her books on the subject were pulled from print.)

Heavy metal was also seen as a culprit and a signifier of Satanic activity, as was the game Dungeons & Dragons. Three teenage boys in Arkansas, the so-called West Memphis Three, were convicted on the flimsiest of evidence of the ritual murder of three little boys; one of the teens, Damien Echols, was sentenced to death, and all three would have died in prison had their case not been covered by a popular documentary series, which attracted intense celebrity support. The West Memphis Three were eventually released from prison after close to twenty years, as were several other people—daycare workers, babysitters, teachers—falsely accused of child abuse.

In the case of Pizzagate, the demonic aspect of the plot was enhanced by an additional thread discovered in John Podesta’s hacked emails: “spirit cooking.” Podesta and his brother, Tony, were purportedly attending Satanic rituals conducted by the artist Marina Abramović where guests dined on semen and blood consumed on “earthquake nights.” “WIKI WICCAN: PODESTA PRACTICES OCCULT MAGIC,” yelled the far-right aggregation site Drudge Report when the telling emails came to light. Alex Jones dubbed spirit cooking “black magic,” and Mike Cernovich weighed in with “sick stuff” and “sex cult.” Abramović’s repeated rebuttals that “Spirit Cooking”—the title of an art installation—was just that, art, and that nobody ate semen, blood, or anything else unsavory, had no impact. Those who bought into spirit cooking as a real demonic activity are certain that Abramović and the Podestas and everyone else involved in this Satanic sex-and-death cult will face their judgment, sooner or later.

These outbreaks of religious hysteria recur so persistently in American life for a reason: they are, like so many conspiracy theories, a response to moments of social change and perceived societal fracture. Satanic Panic allegations first arose during a moment in the 1980s of intense concern over the number of women in the workforce and a subsequent rise in “latchkey kids” and paid caregivers. Pizzagate emerged during the 2016 elections, a time when Americans were relitigating, to an exhausting degree, our beliefs, our vision of America, and our sexual ethics. The paranoid idea of sexual predators hiding in the highest echelons of power was not so paranoid; Pizzagate, though, spun it through a nexus of faux black magic, imagined ritual, and nonsensical accusations that were somehow both unbelievable and yet, for a lot of people, unbelievably powerful.

I had all this in mind during one of the saddest moments of the DC rally, when I spotted a child holding a sign: IF YOU SEE ME WITH JOHN PODESTA, CALL THE POLICE. The little boy carrying the placard was beaming, bouncing up and down on his heels.

“You have the best sign,” a woman told him, leaning down for a high five. His father was next to him in a wheelchair and an InfoWars shirt, glowing as one person after another came up to take photos of his son.

I walked over. The man was Michael White from Pennsylvania; he retired from the Air Force after a workplace injury on a base in Kosovo.

“Tell the lady why you’re here,” he instructed the boy.

“I want to stop child murder once and for all,” he said, carefully.

“And abuse?” his father prompted.

“Yeah,” the boy murmured. “I’m eager to help everyone and stop the kidnapping of teenagers.” He batted impossibly long eyelashes at me. I asked his name, wrote it down, and decided not to use it. I suddenly felt desperately sad.

“What else do you like to do?” I asked him. He looked up at me, confused, then at his father.

“She’s asking what you do for fun,” White explained.

“I like to write and draw and read,” he said triumphantly. We talked for a while about a superhero series he’s working on.

“He’s so great at writing dialogue,” White told me. He seemed so calm and good-tempered that I felt comfortable asking him about what was weighing on me.

“Don’t you worry this is disturbing for him?”

“Well, he’s not really paying attention,” White said. “And I don’t tell him specifics, you know. When we talk about this, I explain everything in a way he can understand.”

White, like everyone else here, is out for the truth, he said. “All we want is an honest public investigation instead of a media blackout and law enforcement refusing to investigate.”

A few minutes later, I was listening to a guy onstage reading from a woman’s account of child abuse he found on the Internet. She described being “sold to ten men” a day, chained up in an attic, forced to drink from a dog bowl. I turned to look at White’s son. He was still holding his sign—gripping it, really—his mouth slightly open, his eyes laser-locked on the stage.

Seaman was turning journalists away, several in a row. Figuring it was a lost cause, I still walked over and gave him my card. An hour or two after the rally, I was glumly eating a salad in some dim, charmless chain restaurant and trying to recover from the ordeal when he texted me on Signal, a secure messaging app.

“I want to befriend you,” the text read. “You seem sincere.”

An hour later, we met at a Starbucks. He came with two women in tow: one, in her early twenties, who was introduced as an intern for his one-man news organization, and an older woman, Liz, who lived in the DC suburbs and helped organize the rally. She said her husband works in government and declined to give her last name. She got into Pizzagate after learning about spirit cooking from a “credible, savvy study group” that she was part of, which used to meet regularly to talk about the election.

“I just froze,” she said, when she heard about spirit cooking. “That kind of thing, you can’t unsee.” She’s visited Comet, she added. “I found it disturbing, and I definitely thought there was something going on.”

Seaman, meanwhile, claimed that the Department of Homeland Security is investigating Podesta. “I have a background source,” he told me, “who’s currently employed at DHS and who’s in a position to know.”

“Is there anything that could convince you this isn’t real?” I asked.

Seaman replied that he’d like to see DHS and the FBI issue statements to that effect. “If DHS calls me and says there’s no trafficking, that’s it.”

“Have you seen the art in John Podesta’s house?” Liz interjected. She was referring to a couple of weird paintings belonging to Tony and John that the Pizzagate people seized on: some nudes and an oil painting in John’s office of a guy on a table in a suit with two men looming over him bearing forks and knives.

There was a heavy, loaded pause.

“It’s not really my taste,” I told her. “But I wouldn’t necessarily interpret it as evil.”

All three of them looked at me, appalled, as though I’d vomited bile on the table.

The conversation never really recovered. I could see Seaman deciding that I’m one of them, the dishonest mainstream press who meant to paint him as crazy. He corrected me, stiffly, when I referred to Pizzagate as a “belief.”

“They’re not beliefs,” he said pointedly. “I didn’t join a church.”

“Millions of us are talking about this online,” he told me before taking his leave. “It’s not going to go away.”

Seaman’s certainty seemed noteworthy: like a lot of people firmly enmeshed in a conspiracy community, Seaman dwelled in an echo chamber so complete, so hermetically sealed, that he seemed incapable of processing anything that might change his mind or believing that anyone who disagreed with him could be anything other than a child-abuse apologist or a pedophile. I doubt that a statement from the FBI or DHS would make a difference to him; instead, he would find a way to explain their roles in the conspiracy. Although there might not have been millions of Pizzagate adherents, the movement could not be totally ignored: it was a crystalline example of an Internet creation that leaked into the real world in ways that were, by turns, startling, comic, alarming, and violent.

Pizzagate shared other traits that are typical of conspiracy communities: it’s both startlingly cohesive—thousands of people are willing to believe in the idea of a global elite sex-trafficking ring headquartered in a pizza parlor—and quick to fracture, breaking into pieces under the weight of mutual suspicion and internecine feuds. That happens in every corner of the world of the deeply suspicious. Conspiracy theorists’ lives can be extremely lonely: the mythology of the lone hero on the hunt for truth, against a mountain of enemies and lies, almost demands it.

Nathan Stolpman, the phone videographer of Lift the Veil and enemy of David Seaman, was pretty sure most of the people at the Lafayette Park rally were plants and bad actors. A former actor and then a used-car salesman, Stolpman was living with his dad at the time of the rally and making Pizzagate videos out of his bedroom. “It’s a suspicious community because there are so many infiltrators trying to make people look bad,” he told me. “And then we make ourselves look bad.” (He meant the yelling, the near fistfights, the online feuding, the dueling videos.)

LaLa, the woman Stolpman accused of being controlled opposition, was disappointed by the depth of the suspicion. She seemed to have come to the rally hoping to find a real-life community to complement the ones she’d found online. “It seems that the core element from everyone in this ‘movement’ is distrust for everyone around them,” she wrote in an email. “Nobody knows who’s on whose side, or what the truth is. And we have a circular firing squad of everyone telling everyone else they are the ‘opposition.’”

Later in the evening, after the rally ended, I pulled together a group of friends—all reporters, for some reason—and headed to dinner at Comet Ping Pong. When I arrived, some of the rallygoers were standing outside, holding INVESTIGATE PIZZAGATE signs.

“Are you going in?” I asked a woman from Fredericksburg.

“I want to take a look around,” she said. She was particularly eager to see the art on the walls, which struck Pizzagaters as Satanic. “I’ve done enough research to know this is real.”

“It seemed to happen more on concert nights,” another demonstrator said, of the sexual abuse. “I’ve seen some of the band names. We believe there’s a whole underlying music scene that’s related.”

After Comet was pinpointed by Reddit detectives as the center of a global sex ring, things got very bad for the staff. Even before Edgar Welch showed up, people posted Facebook videos with graphic threats. The general manager, Bryce Reh, received several: “I’m going to chainsaw you in your sleep,” one read. “I’m looking at your house,” read another. Reh was sent photos of his home. Gay staff members had it worse. “There was definitely a homophobic element to some of it,” Reh says.

The afternoon of the Welch incident, Reh was driving to the restaurant when he got a call that a man with a gun had come barreling through the doors. In a panic, he called his wife, a concert violinist who moonlights as a waitress there, and told her to stay away. Then he called every other employee in his phone. He got to Connecticut Avenue, where Comet is located, only to find the police had roped it off. He parked on a random street corner and sprinted toward the restaurant, pausing to have a shouting match with a police officer who didn’t want to let him through.

In the meantime, after the staff got everyone out the door to safety, they “went down the block to other businesses to warn them,” Reh recounted. He still sounded proud.

In the weeks that followed, Comet brought in trauma counselors for the staff. They assured anyone who wanted to quit that it would be all right, that they’d get severance and no hard feelings. Only a couple of people took them up on the offer. The rest stayed and tried to adjust to their new reality, one where they had to walk past demonstrators and use the stockroom that Welch had shot his way into.

“I didn’t sleep for three days,” Reh told me. One night, he woke up to a loud noise, and was convinced that someone was trying to take a belt sander to the lock on his door. It was only the belt on his neighbor’s air-conditioning unit malfunctioning.

Alefantis had stopped to sneer at the Pizzagate rally, Reh told me, speeding through its outskirts on his bike, but Reh himself was unable to. The most infamous of the Pizzagate photos—of a little girl with her hands taped to a table—bothers him the most. It’s a staff member’s child, and Reh knows that the picture was taken at a school hobby day when the girl’s older sister taped her hands to the table as a joke. She’s grinning into the camera in the photo, her eyes bright.

“They put this photo of her on YouTube videos,” Reh said quietly. “To monetize it. They’re profiting off children in a real way. She will grow up with that photo of her associated with the word ‘pedophilia.’ I can’t see that and not get upset.”

Reh said he and the rest of the staff have worked on adjusting to the threats, the social-media deluge, and the knowledge that someone like Welch could visit again.

“The world is more chaos than we like to imagine,” he said stoically. “The faster we come to terms with that, the more fluidly you can deal with it.” Anyway, he added, “What’s the choice? Lay down and cry?”

We talked until my pizza got cold; eventually Reh stepped away, greeting a staff member and her toddler son with a big hug. I had a beer and then, as a result, a little woozy trouble locating the bathroom, whose door was part of what looks like a solid wood wall. In Pizzagate world, they would find something like that suspicious.

The Comet Ping Pong gunman Edgar Welch pleaded guilty to state and federal weapons charges in March 2017. In June, in an imposing courtroom in DC, he entered in leg shackles and an orange jumpsuit to be sentenced, looking exhausted and pale, with short-buzzed blond hair and a neat goatee. His family and fiancée watched him from a front row, all of them looking exhausted, too. His sister, a tall blond woman, cried intermittently, silently holding a tissue to her mouth.

Welch’s court-appointed defense attorney argued to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson that Welch deserved just eighteen months in prison. She pointed out that in 2010 he’d gone to Haiti for three weeks with his church to work with children orphaned by the hurricane. She described him as a devoutly religious man, devoted to his children, who’d already been deeply damaged by six months of not speaking to them and five weeks in solitary confinement. She also suggested that he was a little naive.

“He’s not as sophisticated as the people who reside in the District of Columbia and are aware of politics,” she told the judge.

Several Comet employees had a chance to read victim impact statements, although none of them used their names in court, to protect their privacy.

“I’m trying to be as sympathetic and empathetic with you as possible,” one, a tall, skinny guy with dark hair and a maroon collared shirt, told Welch. He had been pacing the halls of the courthouse before the hearing began, looking miserable.

“I’m almost sorry you were duped,” he continued, telling Welch he’d “fallen into a trap” set by Pizzagate peddlers like Alex Jones. “And they now believe you’re a hired actor,” he added, not looking at Welch. “That’s how misinformation works, and how the game is played.”

He paused.

“I hope the God who inspired all your tattoos is as forgiving as I am,” he concluded.

Comet’s owner, James Alefantis, a stocky guy with dark curly hair and a blue blazer, spoke, too. He didn’t glance at Welch, either, as he told the judge how proud he was of his staff for their bravery.

“So many of us have suffered because of the defendant’s actions,” he said. “For me, the only good thing that has come of this ordeal is that I now know that I am a member of a community that comes together and raises up any member who has fallen. I know that all the families who experienced such pain by this one man’s decision will not allow their lives to be defined by fear. And I say this with no vengeance and an open heart—I hope that one day, in a more truthful world, every single one of us can remember this as an aberration, a symptom of a time of sickness, when some parts of our world went mad, when news was fake and lies were seen as real and our social fabric frayed.”

Welch himself spoke only for a moment and—as the prosecution pointed out—he never exactly said that he’d been mistaken.

“I wish there was more that I could offer than an apology,” he told the judge quietly, his hands behind his back. “I want to make sure the victims understand I’m sorry for anything I’ve caused.”

“Yours is not an average case,” Judge Jackson told Welch, before she pronounced his sentence. “I’ve never heard anything like the conduct that brings us here today.” She sentenced him to four years in prison and thirty-six months of supervised release, plus $5,744 in restitution to Comet. Welch’s fiancée, very young-looking, with long, silky brown hair and an orange dress with bell sleeves, bent over at the waist as the sentence was pronounced.

As Welch ground through the gears of the penal system, the Pizzagate movement rushed swiftly on without him. By May 2017, “detectives” on the message-board website Voat had found suspicious behaviors in the bearded indie rocker Father John Misty, and the bleach-dipped celebrity chef Guy Fieri, and at a chain of children’s dental offices in Alaska. (They didn’t like the look of photos of the dentist’s office: there were toys in there and cheerful drawings hanging in front of the dental chairs. Most people would argue those were an effort to distract kids having their teeth drilled, but the Pizzagaters saw something a lot more sinister.)

Meanwhile, out in objective reality, a true and ongoing revelation was taking place. Investigative reporting in the New York Times and the New Yorker published in October 2017 revealed that Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was accused of serial rape, while his alleged crimes had been covered up for years. Weinstein’s story broke a dam, and the #MeToo movement came flooding through, in which dozens of powerful abusers in politics, media, and entertainment were outed by the brave survivors of their abuse. It was a world-shaking blow to a patriarchal system of sexual violence that was, inevitably, fed into the Pedogate machine.

“Is Pizzagate all still fake?” David Seaman, the Pizzagate researcher, exulted in a video soon after the Weinstein story broke.

Pizzagate never really ended, then, and none of its prominent members ever admitted that they might have been mistaken. The momentum created out of real people, bots, religion, scapegoating, the alt-right, and the evangelical right was strangely, uniquely, disturbingly unstoppable. Once again, as Americans, we lapsed into an occult hysteria, a persistent need to seek out new witches among us and burn them, one by one, even when they refused to be found.

But the movement was also one that was firmly tied to the chaotic, prismatic tides and ripples of the Internet, and it was as malleable as any other rumor you’d find there. Pizzagate repeatedly changed its form, absorbing, jellyfish-like, the most alluring conspiracy theories of the moment. Over the next year, as the US government’s pedophile core stubbornly refused to collapse, the movement’s truest believers started to believe the deception was even bigger than they’d ever thought possible.

Soon enough, the White Helmets were called into suspicion; the fact that they speedily arrived on the scene to render aid was deemed suspicious. The accusations have toggled between suggesting that the White Helmets faked video footage of the attacks and that they actually carried them out, murdering civilians; in either case, the implication is that the attacks were an attempt to justify Western military intervention in Syria. The claims aren’t very subtle: Russia’s ambassador to the European Union, Vladimir Chizhov, called one chemical attack a “staged event,” adding that the White Helmets were “already caught in the act with staged videos.”

Russian state media—Sputnik and RT—as well as a conspiracy-leaning site called 21st Century Wire that’s often described as sympathetic to the Russian government, began attacking the White Helmets as a terrorist organization in 2018, deeming them likely responsible for the chemical attacks in cooperation with the actual Syrian terrorist group Al-Nusra Front. (In June 2018, for example, both RT and Sputnik claimed that the White Helmets were preparing a “false flag chemical attack” in Idlib, Syria.) Drawing on their large volume of material, far-right bloggers in the United States started to echo the accusation.

The overall effect was to whitewash Assad’s deadly attacks on civilians, casting doubt on their source, and to make it sound as if anyone who talks about the brutality of the Assad regime is a mindless warmonger. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd attacked the White Helmets onstage, calling them “a fake organization that exists only to create propaganda for the jihadists and terrorists,” adding, “If we would listen to the propaganda of the White Helmets and others, we would be encouraged to encourage our governments to go and start dropping bombs on people in Syria.” And Vanessa Beeley, a blogger at 21st Century Wire, claimed that the White Helmets’ work rescuing civilians is actually a sinister act of imperialist control. “Led by the US and UK this group is essential to the propaganda stream that facilitates the continued media and political campaign against the elected Syrian government,” she wrote in 2016, “and permits the US and NATO to justify their regime of crippling economic and humanitarian sanctions against the Syrian people.”

The term “false flag” itself has become more complicated over time. Jones and lesser-known conspiracists, for example, have sometimes said that an incident is a “hybrid:” partly real, partly staged by the government—the Las Vegas shooting as well as the Pulse nightclub massacre have been described that way. How exactly that could be is mind-bending, but it’s a way to point at a theory—the government had a hand in this—without having to interrogate it fully or prove it. (The theorizer might imply that the shooter was brainwashed or mind-controlled into carrying out the government’s dark scheme, but they often decline to be quite that explicit. Jones, for example, speculated that Stephen Paddock was “a patsy” or a victim of CIA brainwashing; InfoWars claimed that an unnamed government source said the attack might have been intended to “increase the Shadow Government’s Surveillance State.”)

Additional events identified as false flags have come to include ever-more-insignificant and far-flung incidents: Robert Ussery, the conspiracy theorist arrested for trespassing at the Sutherland Springs church, claimed that a hot-air-balloon crash outside Austin and even a biker shootout in Waco were both government-orchestrated false flags.

The logic of false flaggery has become so convoluted that Ussery and other lesser conspiracy theorists have said that Alex Jones is himself a false flag, a government plant designed for a sinister purpose. “Alex Jones promotes the hoaxes as real,” Ussery wrote darkly, and incorrectly, on his website. “He is a lying gatekeeper, a government sponsored traitor.”

Even the maker of Loose Change, Dylan Avery, has expressed alarm at the rise of false flag thinking. He told the Outline in 2018 that he sometimes felt alienated from the movement that his film helped create. “Before, when you said you believed in 9/11 Truth, it meant the original investigation was shoddy,” Avery said. “But you weren’t a nutjob. Now, as soon as something happens, people say it’s a false flag.”

How do ideas such as false flags—some of the most complex, unintuitive, hard-to-believe conspiracy theories on the planet—spread and gain such power and force? Kate Starbird, a researcher at the University of Washington, led a team that in 2017 released a study on the ways hoaxes and false flag theories proliferate online following mass shootings. They found that a few sites were central to sharing, spreading, and furthering hoax theories: BeforeItsNews.com, NoDisinfo.com, and VeteransToday.com (a normal-sounding site that frequently runs stories questioning the veracity of Sandy Hook and other mass shootings).

The team found that the conversation around false flags is, not surprisingly, fueled by “alternative” media sites, most of which have certain, easy-to-recognize themes and biases: hostility toward science and the mainstream media is common. “In addition to anti-globalist and anti-media views, we found content that was anti-vaccine, anti-GMO, and anti–climate science,” Starbird and her coauthors wrote. “Most alternative media domains contained accusations about the activities of George Soros and the Rothschilds, and almost all hosted articles referencing “pedophile rings” of high-powered people around the world.”

There was another important element: the same stories, sometimes verbatim, appeared on different sites, over and over again. “We found the same stories on multiple domains, sometimes as exact copies, but also in different forms,” the team noted. “This means that an individual using these sites is likely seeing the same messages in different forms and in different places, which may distort their perception of this information as it gives the false appearance of source diversity.”

I often saw the same thing in conspiracy news sources, the most intriguing source being a writer named Makia Freeman. That probably isn’t his real name (nothing matching showed up in public records). For years his byline appeared across the conspiracy-verse, on a variety of little-known sites: ToolsForFreedom.com, Wake Up World, Paranoia Magazine, The Daily Sheeple, and The Sleuth Journal, as well as the slightly better-trafficked Before It’s News. On one site, Freeman’s online bio said that he writes on “many aspects of the global conspiracy, from vaccines to Zionism to false flag operations and more, and also including info on natural health, sovereignty and higher consciousness.” As with the conspiracy sources Starbird studied, Freeman’s articles frequently appeared identically or near-identically across multiple sites, populating an information world that is, on closer inspection, a lot like a hall of mirrors.

The motives of sites such as Before It’s News or The Daily Sheeple can be hard to parse, beyond generating clicks through frightening, outrageous, and alarming headlines. Sometimes, though, the motives are a little clearer. That’s the case with NewsBusters.org, a site run by the conservative group Media Research Center. The MRC is funded largely by the Mercer family, who backed Trump and a host of other ultra-conservative causes. NewsBusters is focused on liberal media lies, and it is prominently shared by other conspiracy sites.

Starbird’s research also found that Twitter users who shared information from NoDisinfo and Veterans Today were more prone to sharing information from RT and Sputnik. In other words, there are unholy and chaotic alliances among state-sponsored actors, bots, trolls, and garden-variety conspiracy theorists to help advance untrue stories, funneling them from the farthest fringes into the mainstream.

One particularly stunning example was covered by journalist Adrian Chen, who wrote in 2015 about a “troll farm” in St. Petersburg, Russia, where an army of employees paid by the Internet Research Agency sat all day long, posting disinformation and trying to sow chaos around catastrophic events in the United States. Some were real natural disasters, while some were entirely false events: nonexistent fires, fake shootings. The Internet Research Agency, Chen found, possibly had ties to an oligarch who was an ally of Vladimir Putin. The “troll farms,” as Chen explained in the New Yorker, were also part of an effort to kneecap Internet-based organizing and weaken people’s confidence in what they saw online. “Trolling has become a key tool in a comprehensive effort by Russian authorities to rein in a previously freewheeling Internet culture,” he wrote, particularly after massive anti-Putin protests were organized on social media.

Most of the time, false flag conspiracy theories do not have far-reaching global implications. Usually, the effect of the theorists is to make the lives of mass casualty survivors very difficult, and the wider world does not necessarily hear about it. The harassment of the families in Sutherland Springs, for example, amounted to a couple of tiny national news blips.

Particularly painful for individual survivors is the idea of the crisis actor. For close to a decade, even as false flag peddlers harassed and terrorized people who had lost loved ones in mass shootings, much of the United States had never heard that term. That changed in February 2018, when a mass shooter killed seventeen people and wounded seventeen more at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Some of the teenagers who survived the Parkland attack became immediate and well-spoken advocates for gun control, transforming their pain and grief into political action. As they became more famous, students such as David Hogg and Emma González were subjected to intense hostility and false flag suspicions. It struck many of the usual suspects as just too tidy and contrived that they were attacked (with a gun) and immediately began fighting for gun control. But Hogg and González and the other Parkland teens responded forcefully to accusations that they were tools of the federal government. “I’m not a crisis actor,” Hogg told Anderson Cooper on CNN, a few days after the shooting. “I’m someone who had to witness this and live through this.”

Thus the wider world discovered the concept of the crisis actor. It first appeared, however, years earlier, immediately following the killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, on a number of conspiracy blogs that seized on a press release issued by a company called Visionbox. Located in Denver, Visionbox is an acting studio; a little over a month before the Sandy Hook shootings, the company announced that its students were available to help with “active shooter drills and mall shooting full-scale exercises.” They were clearly offering to help companies and law enforcement with such exercises, but conspiracy theorists seized on the phrasing, specifically a section that promised the students were willing to play civilians.

“The actors can play the part of the shooters, mall employees, shoppers in the mall, shoppers who continue to arrive at the mall, media reporters and others rushing to the mall, and persons in motor vehicles around the mall,” the release read. “Visionbox Crisis Actors can also play the role of citizens calling 911 or mall management, or posting comments on social media websites.” Two sites, Fellowship of the Minds and Memory Hole Blog, pounced on the press release as evidence that “crisis actors,” a term they quickly co-opted, were being hired to carry out fake events like Sandy Hook. And if the events were staged, then the victims—the dead and the wounded—were also faked, alive and well, perhaps, or wholly invented. Soon, James Tracy, the publisher and main author behind Memory Hole Blog, became embroiled in a feud with a Sandy Hook family over their murdered child, one that dragged on for years.

Lenny and Veronique Pozner were the parents of Noah Pozner, the youngest child to die in the mass school shooting. Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists insist that Noah never existed and thus never died. Or else they sarcastically insist that he died twice, once at Sandy Hook and again in Peshawar, Pakistan, two years later, where Noah’s photograph was displayed at a memorial for child shooting victims in Pakistan (although he was not represented as a victim of that shooting).

A father of four, James Tracy was for many years a professor of media studies at Florida Atlantic University. A syllabus for one of Tracy’s classes shows a very thoughtful reading list about the role of conspiracy theories in public life and conspiracy panics—the periodic sense we get in the United States that conspiracies are swamping us, taking over, and warping reality. But something changed for Tracy, and he went from teaching a syllabus related to conspiracy theories to spreading some of the most egregious ones. In December 2015, in an op-ed for the Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Pozners wrote that Tracy had begun harassing them after they demanded that conspiracy sites stop using Noah’s image.

“Tracy even sent us a certified letter demanding proof that Noah once lived, that we were his parents, and that we were the rightful owner of his photographic image,” they wrote. “We found this so outrageous and unsettling that we filed a police report for harassment. Once Tracy realized we would not respond, he subjected us to ridicule and contempt on his blog, boasting to his readers that the ‘unfulfilled request’ was ‘noteworthy’ because we had used copyright claims to ‘thwart continued research of the Sandy Hook massacre event.’”

The Pozners also charged that Tracy was using his university credentials to bolster his assertions. In a response letter to the Pozners’ op-ed that was never published but that Tracy later read in court, he wrote, “The Pozners, alas, are as phony as the drill itself and profiting handsomely from the fake death of their son.”

Tracy was eventually fired for his writing on the Memory Hole Blog site, with FAU claiming that he hadn’t properly disclosed the blog as an “outside activity” that could potentially affect the university. Tracy promptly sued FAU, alleging wrongful termination and an abridgment of his rights to free speech, but he lost. He always maintained that he didn’t discuss Sandy Hook in class, and that outside of work he was just asking questions the media refused to consider. In a statement to CNN, he wrote that his research “led me to conclude that the nation’s media failed to provide an accurate, in-depth and sustained investigation of what took place at the school on the morning of December 14.”

The unanswered questions are how did Tracy come to hold the beliefs that he does, and how did they come to control his life to the extent that he lost his job and a good deal of his public standing? Tracy appeared frequently on conspiracy podcasts but never submitted to an interview with an actual journalist. In response to an interview request, he referred me to his attorney, Louis Leo IV, who repeated that Tracy never discussed Sandy Hook with his FAU students and his firing was illegal. “Tracy’s case has nothing to do with ‘Pozner’ (if that’s even a real name) or Sandy Hoax,” Leo wrote. “It’s about the First Amendment.”

In a phone conversation, Leo proved himself eager to join and even outdo his clients in mass-shooting denialism. “I think Sandy Hook was staged,” he said, then paused, and corrected himself. “I don’t like to use that because you can stage a real shooting. They were making things up. Nobody died.” The theory Leo and other Sandy Hook truthers subscribed to was that the school had been closed for years before the attack took place. “If you look at some parts of the school, it was in disrepair,” he said. “It was like a ghost school. It had been out of service. Hadn’t been functioning as a real school in a long time.”

“This category of recent conspiracy theorists is really a global network of village idiots,” Pozner told me by phone. “They would have never been able to find each other before, but now it’s this synergistic effect of the combination of all of them from all over the world. There are haters from Australia and Europe and they can all make a YouTube video in fifteen seconds.” Pozner was, as New York magazine noted, mildly interested in the fun, lighthearted kinds of conspiracy theories before his son died: Bigfoot, Area 51, the one about how the Denver Airport is a secret Illuminati hub. He would sometimes tune in to InfoWars in his car, but he didn’t take it, or Alex Jones, at all seriously.

After Noah died, when people like Jones started to call the attack suspicious (“I’ve looked at it,” Jones declared in 2014, “and undoubtedly there’s a cover-up, there’s actors, they’re manipulating, they’ve been caught lying, and they were pre-planning before it and rolled out with it”), Pozner took on a new mission. As Sandy Hook theories started ricocheting around the Internet, he thought he could probably talk some sense into the people spreading those theories, given that he was once a lot like them.

Pozner quickly found that trying to engage with conspiracy theorists just made him an object of threats and suspicion by an army of Internet personalities. For his trouble, Pozner was fixated on by two of the biggest Sandy Hook hoax peddlers, Tracy and Wolfgang Halbig. A grandfather from Florida, Halbig claims to be a former state trooper and “school safety expert.” He became a Sandy Hook denier early, making a speech before the Newtown Board of Education in 2014, saying that he wished only to find the truth about the murdered children. He has since made dozens of trips to Newtown, spending all of his pension and $100,000 more, and returning even as a growing chorus of Newtown dads let him know he’s in danger of an ass-kicking.

“I call it an illusion,” Halbig told the BBC, referring to Sandy Hook. “The biggest government illusion that’s ever been pulled off by Homeland Security.” He added, “I’ll be honest with you. If I’m wrong, I need to be institutionalized.”

When Pozner tried to contact Halbig, before he stopped working to persuade the deniers, he got a response from a different Sandy Hook denier. “Wolfgang does not wish to speak with you,” this person wrote, “unless you exhume Noah’s body and prove to the world you lost your son.”

Eventually, Pozner sued Halbig for invasion of privacy. Around the same time he filed the suit, he assembled what he called a “one-hundred-page book” about Halbig’s life to demonstrate what Pozner sees as his habit of lying and misrepresentation.

According to Pozner, Halbig’s interest in Sandy Hook was only the latest in a long line of similar obsessions. “Halbig gave other hoaxers and harassers copies of my TransUnion Comprehensive Background check, copies of my driver’s license, social security numbers of myself and family members, and photos if they donated money to his ‘Sandy Hook Justice’ nonprofit.” Pozner says. “He has sent thousands of harassing emails over the years: to me, to my attorney, to other victims’ families, to the school board members, to the police, to government officials, even to the FBI. I had to file charges with the police to get him to stop contacting me, not just with claims about my son and my family but about a whole host of other conspiracies that he was trying to raise money to pursue.”

Pozner points out that a retiree with grandchildren presumably has better ways to spend his time. “He doesn’t go fishing or get together with his buddies. He starts blasting out these harassing emails to the FBI, to governors, to police, to school districts, to crime victims, to my attorney who then charges me because every email he has to read for fifteen minutes. It’s a nightmare.” Pozner has spent, he says, thousands of dollars in legal bills “just in Halbig sending spam. It’s insane.”

None of this seemed to bother Halbig, who maintained a cherubically sunny demeanor at every public appearance. He was even thrilled when nine Newtown families brought suit against the manufacturers of the AR-15, the gun that the shooter, Adam Lanza, used to kill their children. “They’ll have to exhume the bodies to prove it was the AR-15 that actually killed the children,” he told New York giddily.

Halbig and Tracy are only the most well-known Sandy Hook deniers. There is also James Fetzer, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth, who has written about conspiracy theories since around 2000, beginning with JFK and accelerating into Sandy Hook denialism. His barebones blog has exposed everything he considers a false flag or an operation by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, which is a lot of things. A Holocaust denier, too, Fetzer maintained that Sandy Hook was “a FEMA drill to promote gun control,” one in which nobody died.

In an object lesson on the spread of conspiracism—and the ways it can immiserate everyone involved—sites like Fetzer’s succeeded in converting fifty-seven-year-old Lucy Richards of Brandon, Florida, to denialism. Richards was at one point a waitress, but according to court documents had been living on disability payments for thirteen years, diagnosed first with agoraphobia and then obsessive-compulsive disorder. She didn’t have a computer, but she had a cell phone. At some point, she started reading, and that reading took her to some strange places, among them InfoWars and James Fetzer’s website.

It’s difficult to tell what about the story affected her, what button it pushed, what triggered an apparently volcanic rage. On January 10, 2016, Richards called and emailed Lenny Pozner. “Look behind you,” one message read. “Death is coming to you real soon.”

“Death is coming to you real soon and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“LOOK BEHIND YOU, IT IS DEATH.”

Richards made little effort to mask her identity, but it took almost an entire year for her to be charged. She told her lawyer that she was “reared in a hellhole.” At the time she stumbled on Sandy Hook denialism, she’d been estranged from her family for years. In her mugshots, Richards is a ghastly figure, with stringy hair, a pasty face, and a desperate expression.

She was indicted on four counts of transmitting threats across state lines, a federal offense. A plea deal would have allowed her to serve her sentence of five months on house arrest, but Richards failed to show up for her initial sentencing hearing. She was arrested and sentenced to serve out her time in jail.

“I don’t know where my head and my heart were that day when I made the calls, but they were not in the right place,” Richards meekly told the court when she was sentenced. As part of her sentence, the judge forbade her from looking at conspiracy websites.

Lenny Pozner, meanwhile, found that his life had been devoured—or shaped, if we want to put it more neutrally—by his crusade against the “truthers,” a term he preferred not to use. (He dubbed them “hoaxers” instead.) A few years after Sandy Hook, he formed an organization called the HONR Network, devoted to fighting denial and other kinds of conspiracism he considered particularly toxic, the kind in which the families of murdered children are harassed. YouTube was where he focused most of his energy.

“The responsible parties are Facebook and Google and YouTube,” he said. He would file copyright complaints or a terms of service violation whenever a website or a video used photos of Noah taken by the Pozners. As often as not, Google and YouTube refused to respond or sent polite auto-replies rejecting the complaints as having no merit. “Fighting with Google is a constant,” he said.

Pozner made a case that he recognizes as unappealing for some: for more regulation and control of the Internet, arguing that this is the only thing that can pull us back from the brink. “I understand that the concept of greater user safety measures is unpopular with these social media platforms because of cost and ideology,” Pozner told me. “But we can’t sustain an Internet that is unsafe for users and overrun with content that causes mass delusion, violence, and a threat to democracy.”

But Wheeler backtracked almost immediately. He vaguely told Fox 5 there had been a “miscommunication,” as it announced on May 17, and that he didn’t actually have any such proof. In a defamation and discrimination lawsuit he later filed against Fox, he argued that he never said any of the quotes attributed to him. Fox 5 retracted its story within two days, but it took national Fox News a full week to issue its own weak-kneed retraction, which said only that the story “was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.”

In that week, Hannity devoted an increasing amount of time to Rich conspiracies. Fox personalities Laura Ingraham and Lou Dobbs also gave airtime to the Rich case, but Hannity was by far the most fervent. He even announced plans to interview Kim Dotcom, an eccentric Internet maven who lives in New Zealand (and who was resisting extradition to the United States, where he was wanted on charges of fraud and racketeering), after Dotcom dubiously claimed that he had known Rich was the source of the WikiLeaks emails all along. Hannity was giddy. “Stay tuned,” he tweeted. “Public invitation Kim Dotcom to be a guest on radio and TV. #GameChanger Buckle up destroy Trump media. Sheep that u all are!!!”

A day after Hannity’s invite to Dotcom, Mary and Joel Rich published a raw editorial in the Washington Post. “Seth’s death has been turned into a political football,” they wrote. “Every day we wake up to new headlines, new lies, new factual errors, new people approaching us to take advantage of us and Seth’s legacy. It just won’t stop.”

Why would it not stop? Why the mounting Seth Rich fervor? A possible explanation came via Wheeler’s lawsuit against Fox News, in which he said that the White House had encouraged him to push the Seth Rich conspiracy theories to draw attention away from the administration’s alleged Russian collusion. Wheeler claimed that he had been paid by a wealthy Trump supporter, Ed Butowsky, who cooked up a plot with the administration and Fox News to “help put to bed speculation that President Trump colluded with Russia in an attempt to influence the outcome of the presidential election.”

According to Wheeler’s suit, Butowsky had claimed that Trump was eagerly awaiting the Rich story, texting Wheeler, “Not to add any more pressure but the president just read the article,” allegedly referring to the Fox News national story. “He wants the article out immediately. It’s now all up to you. But don’t feel the pressure.” The suit noted that Butowsky and Wheeler had met with the press secretary, Sean Spicer, to apprise him of the Rich story. That was, staggeringly, true, confirmed by Spicer, showing a startling level of cooperation between Fox and the White House. Spicer told NPR that Butowsky and Wheeler merely briefed him on the progress of the story: “It had nothing to do with advancing the president’s domestic agenda—and there was no agenda.” (Butowsky, meanwhile, claimed to NPR that he had been “joking” in his text to Wheeler.)

Other Trump media supporters also weren’t particularly interested in the accuracy of Fox 5’s report. Between May and June 2017, conservative outlet Breitbart ran at least twelve articles about Rich’s death, many of them heavily implying that it was suspicious, and castigated “left-wing media” like CNN and the New York Times for ignoring the story in favor of “conspiracy articles about Russian hacking.” That line of thought was echoed by former Speaker of the House and Trump loyalist Newt Gingrich, who attacked the focus on the Russian collusion allegations. “We have this very strange story now of this young man who worked for the Democratic National Committee and who was apparently assassinated at 4 in the morning,” Gingrich declared, “having given WikiLeaks 53,000 emails and 17,000 attachments. Nobody is investigating that. And what does that tell you about what was going on? Because, it turns out, it wasn’t the Russians. It was this young guy who, I suspect, was disgusted by the corruption of the Democratic National Committee. He’s been killed, and apparently nothing serious has been done to investigate his murder.”

The Russian embassy in London—another political entity eager to distract from any potential Russian hacking—got in on the action, too. “WikiLeaks informer Seth Rich murdered in US,” the embassy’s verified Twitter account tweeted. “But MSM was so busy accusing Russian hackers to take notice.”

The reason that Trump’s media supporters clung so tightly to the Rich case was not just for its political value, but because it worked on some sector of the public. Outrage over the murder served as a useful focal point to organize a Trump base, a straightforward alternate story that could be picked up and rallied around: a brave truth-teller speaking out against DNC corruption was murdered. We can see the cycle clearly at work: the speculations and insinuations of conspiracy peddlers were amplified until they made their way into the mainstream, first via Julian Assange, then Fox News. That attention gave the conspiracy peddlers more grist for their various mills, which in turn gave the self-investigators already sniffing around the Rich story even more material and motivation to continue.

The effect on the public was visible: as the story spread aloft on the wings of smaller conspiracy sites and Fox, every word was carried further by a pliant mob of followers, who tweeted under the hashtag #WhoKilledSethRich and followed each development on Reddit and other message boards. Those folks were neither swayed or convinced by, or even particularly empathetic to, the Rich family. After all, who could say if they were really the ones pleading for mercy or whether a nefarious entity was working their mouths like they were compliant Muppets?

Caitlin Johnstone, a popular independent writer who mostly releases her work on the self-publishing site Medium, embodied the sentiments of the self-appointed Rich detectives. “Speaking for myself I am not pushing any political agenda at all by reporting on the Seth Rich case,” she wrote. “I’m pushing the prevention of a world-ending nuclear holocaust.” Johnstone argued that nothing less than the fate of the world depended on the story. “If Rich was the DNC leaker,” she added, “the life of every single living organism on earth may depend upon the public gaining access to that knowledge. This is infinitely more important than one family’s feelings about American public discourse.”

The chaos all this unleashed on the Rich family is indescribable: the dubious tips and offers of “help” soon turned to vitriol when the family didn’t behave in the desired way. On his radio show Roger Stone accused Seth Rich’s parents of engaging in “suspicious” behavior and told the Miami New Times that the family didn’t have a right to grieve in private. “Their right to privacy is important, but not as important as the public’s right to the truth,” he said. “Frankly, at this point, the parents should be charged with obstruction.” In July, he tweeted a suggestion that they’d been paid off and didn’t want to solve their son’s murder.

Cernovich and Stone and Posobiec and even Johnstone, then, were the conspiracy entrepreneurs peddling theories to a receptive audience on Twitter and YouTube and Facebook and Medium. It’s an extremely canny publicity tactic, a way for such people to adeptly leap from one issue to another, to whatever happens to be capturing the public’s attention at any moment. Right-wing conspiracies helped Cernovich transition away from the no-longer-fashionable world of men’s rights and juice peddling; they brought Posobiec out of TV-recap obscurity; and they gave Roger Stone the constant negative attention he requires in order to stay alive.

But the self-investigators are just as important, since these theories would not serve the entrepreneurs’ purpose if there were no groups of people who were swayed by them. What really motivates the self-investigators? Not many people set out intending to harass a grieving family or add to their pain. Viewed more charitably, self-investigators seem to find meaning, excitement, and purpose in banding together online to solve tantalizing mysteries and cover-ups. For those reasons, they’re the bread and butter of conspiracy entrepreneurs.

“Millions of people … are abandoning traditional sources of information, from the government to the institutional media, in favor of a D.I.Y. approach to fact-finding,” Jonathan Mahler wrote in the New York Times, referring to Pizzagate gunman Edgar Welch. In my travels through the far reaches of conspiracy America I, too, met countless people who told me they had uncovered the truth about Seth Rich or Pizzagate or September 11 by doing their “own research,” as virtually every person put it. Tellingly, nobody pointed to Mike Cernovich, YouTube, Reddit, or sites like WhatDoesItMean as their source. Instead they cite “primary documents” or more vaguely “a variety of sources.”

Online self-investigation has roots as deep as the Internet. It arguably began as blogs became more popular at the turn of the century—Blogger was created in 1999 and WordPress in 2003—and took off in 2005 with the founding of YouTube. In Real Enemies, Kathryn Olmsted points out that a variety of 9/11-oriented websites popped up in 2002, dedicating themselves to questioning the real story and advancing the truth movement.

The purpose of the 9/11 truth movement—and virtually every “research community” that’s sprung up since—isn’t necessarily to advance a complete, coherent, agreed-upon alternate narrative about what happened. As Olmsted notes, many people simply “contented themselves with pointing out the weaknesses of the official story.” Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, once again.

That certainly happened with Pizzagate, where the number of alternate theories about what really took place reached a dizzying multitude. The Seth Rich story was slightly more streamlined—most of the online investigators seem to agree that he was killed by someone affiliated with the Clintons—but still had a number of competing factions, each with its own narrative and claims to have done the most exhaustive research. And the DNC and Podesta leaks proved invaluable for aspiring self-investigators, providing an actual third-party source, albeit not one that proved the existence of a global sex ring or the murder of a DNC staffer by a crazed presidential candidate. But that’s the thing about self-investigation: it only confirms what the investigator thinks she already knows. It’s a closed loop, confined to the Internet and to ideas that the investigator finds believable or plausible from the outset.

Mahler likened the phenomenon to a washing machine: “Proceeding from the assumption that the so-called experts are not to be trusted, self-investigators are pushed and pulled by the churn of memes and social media, an endless loop of echoes, reflections and intentional lies,” he wrote. “With only themselves and their appetites as a guide, they bypass any information that doesn’t suit their predisposition and worldview. The self-investigator’s media diet is like an endless breakfast buffet, only without the guilt: Take what you want, leave what you don’t.”

This seems like an Internet-specific phenomenon, but not everyone agrees. “I’m generally skeptical of claims that say the Internet has changed conspiracy theorizing,” Joseph Uscinski, coauthor of American Conspiracy Theories, maintained. “I mean, they were burning women at the stake four hundred years ago, long before the Internet. Facebook didn’t tell them to do it.” He points out, too, that the number of people who visit conspiracy sites is far lower than those who visit non-conspiratorial, traditional news sites. “There’s tons of everything on the Internet,” he said. “When I put in the words ‘duck confit recipe,’ I get half a million recipes. But nobody’s racing home to cook duck confit. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean anyone cares. The things people look at are things they’re predisposed to look at.”

Uscinski’s position doesn’t take into account the role of social media, however. Through Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, more and more people who might not be predisposed to reading about the Clinton body count or pedophiles in the pizza parlor will nevertheless run across that content. More important, Facebook and Twitter have a way of flattening information, making every source look the same or appear equally plausible. And YouTube has been criticized for the way its algorithm promotes conspiracy videos, pushing them into viewers’ suggested items to watch next.

That has been a long-standing issue with recent, halfhearted fixes. Facebook rolled out a tag flagging misleading news sources several months after the election and even then only in response to criticism that hoaxes had been allowed to flourish unchecked. YouTube said it would add Wikipedia links to videos touching on “contested” topics, a strangely half-formed proposal that was announced without telling Wikipedia about it. (I have never personally seen a YouTube video with a Wikipedia link attached; by the summer of 2018, though, a few search terms, like “Sandy Hook hoax,” would show a link to an encyclopedia article about the shooting at the top of the search page. Other search terms, such as “9/11 inside job,” did not trigger a similar result.)

Twitter had no particular mechanism for flagging or questioning fake information. At one point, to widespread outrage, CEO Jack Dorsey suggested that journalists using the site should act as its watchdogs and fact-checkers. Permanent Twitter bans are rare and usually spurred by acts such as inciting virulent harassment mobs or making death threats against celebrities. In the winter of 2017, Twitter started removing verification badges from such people as white nationalists, out of concern that its blue check mark implied endorsement of the author’s position; it even deleted a few people’s accounts, but this was largely too little, too late. YouTube and Facebook’s trending topics and videos continued to feature conspiracy sites and channels, although Facebook eventually killed the trending topics feature entirely.

However, social media sites did turn their focus on one particularly prominent conspiracy peddler: Facebook, iTunes, music-streaming service Spotify, email marketing service MailChimp, Pinterest, and eventually Twitter banned InfoWars content; Facebook also barred Alex Jones’s personal profile page. Twitter was slow to take action, finally lowering the boom only after Jones appeared on Capitol Hill during a series of congressional hearings into social media companies’ efforts to police their content and filter disinformation. Jones picked a fight with Florida senator Marco Rubio in a hallway (“frat boy” and “go back to your bathhouse” were among the jeers) and separately with CNN journalist Oliver Darcy (a “rat”). Twitter said in a statement that a video InfoWars uploaded of the confrontation with Darcy violated its ban on “abusive behavior.”

That’s not to say, though, that banning conspiracy peddlers from these services is a long-term fix or one without challenges. Social media sites are private companies and free to ban whomever they like. But where to draw the line? Who decides what constitutes hate speech? And surely, in part, some of these services are hamstrung by a grim, darkly funny logical endpoint: Trump is the best-known political figure on earth to use social media to spread conspiracy theories. Any banning policy would, in the end, have to cover him, too.

Social media’s minor fixes arrived too late for the Rich family. As they discovered, social sites give enterprising self-investigators access to the subjects of their conspiracies as never before. Investigators can tweet at them, leave hateful messages on their Facebook profiles, and follow their movements. That is what happened to the Riches, who by the spring of 2017 had largely retreated from speaking publicly: every interview was the impetus for another round of vitriol, another chorus of accusations and threats.

Self-investigation is a series of little bonfires, all over the country. With the accelerants of fame, media attention, and politically motivated actors, those bonfires can turn into infernos. The implications of Seth’s death kept getting bigger and darker until eventually—perhaps inevitably—they conflated with Pizzagate. The Pizzagate Voat board became engulfed by Seth Rich speculation: Rich’s death, once solved, would explain a grand unified theory of diabolical deeds perpetrated by the government, from sex trafficking to murder to global enslavement. “If his murder is tied to the DNC and people go down for it I think we’ll have a mass awakening to the evil that is our ruling elite,” one user opined.

The speculation and anticipatory excitement only continued as every month brought a new and more bizarre Seth Rich development. In June 2017, a group calling itself the Profiling Project announced that its investigation of the primary evidence concluded that Rich’s death was the work of either a serial killer or a gun for hire. The volunteers on the Profiling Project were George Washington University forensic psychology graduate students and instructors. One of them, Kevin Doherty, told Newsweek, “The fact that this person has gotten away with it shows a level of proficiency.” Crucially, the group was wholly funded by Jack Burkman, the Republican lobbyist hell-bent on proving that Russians killed Seth, who pledged that he would never stop his quest, even though the Rich family had long since stopped speaking to him and begged publicly for an end to “partisan narratives.”

In the end, the one thing that the Rich family wanted most—to solve the mystery of Seth’s death—remained frustratingly out of reach. And while they weren’t resistant to hearing theories about what had happened, none of what the self-appointed investigators came up with sounded remotely related to his brother, Aaron told me. “I would be extremely surprised to find out that Seth did any of the things people seem to think he did. I don’t think he had the IT skills to do it,” he said, referring to the DNC hacking. “I don’t think he had the personality to do it.” (In interviews, friends and colleagues said that Seth wasn’t particularly tech-savvy. He couldn’t understand, for example, that companies he would lodge complaints with on Twitter never responded because his account was private.) “You have to point to some proof.”

Aaron ultimately sued several people for making what he calls false claims about his brother’s role in the DNC email theft, including Ed Butowsky and the Washington Times, a right-wing paper that had absurdly blamed Aaron himself for the hacking, writing that it was “well known in intelligence circles that Seth Rich and his brother, Aaron Rich, downloaded the DNC emails and was paid by WikiLeaks for that information.” The Rich family also sued Fox News, a lawsuit that was dismissed (for failure to state a claim) at the same time as Rod Wheeler’s suit against the media giant was dismissed. And Brad Bauman, the family spokesperson, sued the Washington Times, a company called America First Media Group, and America First’s founder Matt Couch for defamation.

The constant volley of speculation and threats and harassment and misinformation did not only discredit Seth and dishonor his memory. It made it harder for the family to grieve Seth’s death and process their loss. “I want to be with my family, but instead we’re having to see what’s the next article that comes out,” Aaron told me. “Because of the claims being made, unfortunately we can’t just ignore it, we can’t be silent.” Instead of mourning, the family was forced to respond to the seeming endless waves of faux investigators. “It’s hugely detrimental. It literally is taking—” Aaron stopped and had to take a long breath.

“None of us have any spare emotion,” he finished, finally. “And this is taking all the emotion we have instead of it being put into grieving.”

To be clear, the history of vaccines has not been without genuine danger and controversy. In the United States, vaccine opponents received sobering confirmation of their fears in 1901, when thirteen children in St. Louis died after receiving a diphtheria antitoxin that had been accidentally contaminated with tetanus. The same year, a contaminated smallpox vaccine killed several children in Camden, New Jersey. Those tragic incidents led Congress to pass the Biologics Control Act, which standardized the vaccination production process and required pharmaceutical firms manufacturing vaccines to be licensed.

That made vaccine formulation significantly safer but did not eradicate resistance to it. In his book, Suspicious Minds, Rob Brotherton points to a controversy during the mid-1970s, when parents in England, Asia, and the United States claimed that the DPT vaccine (against diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus) had made their children sick. It is likely that the vaccine did cause seizures and development delays in some children; like all vaccines, DPT carried a risk of side effects. In 1982 a documentary called Vaccine Roulette aired on a Washington, DC, station: it gives equal time to vaccine researchers working for the FDA and to researchers calling the DPT vaccine outdated and insufficiently “pure.” It downplays the dangers of serious diseases like whooping cough while presenting the vaccines as irresponsible to give to children. In both the United Kingdom and the United States, vaccination rates dipped in response to the film; as in the case of MMR, they began to increase only after concerted responses from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the CDC, and the British Joint Commission on Vaccination and Immunization.

In 1986, the United States passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and in 1988 created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, whose very existence has been used as proof by anti-vaccination activists that vaccines are unavoidably unsafe. In fact, though, the program, which is funded through the Department of Health and Human Services, was set up as a response to a wave of DPT-related lawsuits. Parents alleging DPT injuries were awarded huge amounts at jury trials, and soon pharmaceutical companies were no longer producing the DPT vaccine, fearful of litigation. When the last DPT vaccine manufacturer threatened to stop production, the vaccine court was created as a no-fault system for the federal government to award money to the plaintiffs without affecting pharmaceutical companies or burying vaccinations under a tide of lawsuits.

The CDC now uses a tool called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which requires doctors to report reactions to vaccinations. The CDC estimates that doctors file about thirty thousand reports each year, about 85 to 90 percent of them describing mild side effects like fever, arm soreness, or “crying and mild irritability.” The remaining 10 to 15 percent involve serious adverse events resulting in “permanent disability, hospitalization, life-threatening illness, or death.” Even then, the CDC and most public health experts agree that while vaccines can be followed by adverse reactions, they are rarely caused by the vaccine. Nonetheless, there are still vaccine deaths across the world: in June 2017 in South Sudan, fifteen children died after a botched measles vaccination. The vaccine was apparently left unrefrigerated, and one syringe was reused for four days.

For their part, anti-vaxxers tend to downplay the seriousness of disease outbreaks when they do occur. A popular anti-vaccination naturopathic physician, Sherri Tenpenny, has for years claimed that infants “rarely” die from measles. “Why is there such HYSTERIA over measles?” Tenpenny wrote on her medical practice’s Facebook page in 2013. “It is a rash, fever and desquamation of skin on hands and soles after 10 days, signaling the end of the infection and the resultant lifetime immunity. Doctors in the 1940s (the last THINKING doctors, IMO) wrote many articles about how important a measles infection was to long term health and vitality. Now, we act like measles somehow equates to DEATH.”

In fact, it can. According to the World Health Organization, some 134,000 children worldwide died from measles in 2015. Early that year, a measles outbreak at Disneyland infected 147 people and spread across seven states and into Canada and Mexico. It was the largest outbreak of the disease since 1991, and an analysis in the journal JAMA Pediatrics found that it was fueled in part by parents who declined to vaccinate their kids.

The need for everyone to vaccinate their children—except those with legitimate medical reasons—was brutally demonstrated when a sudden measles outbreak in Minnesota revealed that Somali parents there weren’t vaccinating their children. Vaccination rates in the area first started to dip in 2008, when Somali parents there noticed, with alarm, that many of their children were enrolled in programs for children on the autism spectrum. They didn’t recall having seen autism before coming to the United States. Even though a University of Minnesota study showed that autism rates were virtually the same among white and Somali children, and only somewhat higher than the Latino and African American populations, the findings didn’t soothe frightened parents. Oh, and also—between 2008 and 2016, Andrew Wakefield came to speak at Somali community forums at least twice.

In 2016, public health officials found that only about 41 percent of Somali toddlers in Minnesota had received the MMR vaccine, according to the state Department of Health, with many parents in the community apparently following anti-vaccine activists’ instructions to either forgo the vaccine entirely or wait till their children were five years old. (The CDC recommends that children get their first dose at twelve to fifteen months old.) The outbreak began in late March 2017; by August, seventy-nine people had become sick and twenty-two were hospitalized. More than eight thousand people in all were estimated to have been exposed to the disease.

In both the cases of Disneyland and Minnesota, anti-vaccination activists attributed the outbreaks to dark machinations. They suggested that at Disneyland the outbreak was either engineered by the government or played up by a compliant media to pass a controversial California state law, SB 277, which requires immunizations for children to attend daycare or public school. Conservative television personality and enthusiastic conspiracist Glenn Beck baldly called the outbreak a “hoax.” “Is it possible we have been lied to about the measles, this outbreak?” he pontificated on his show in February 2015. The news reports, he said, were meant to instill a “herd mentality,” so that parents would “grab their children and obey the government.”

In Minneapolis, health officials told the Washington Post they had received word that white women visiting Somali communities across the city had claimed, the Post wrote, that “the measles outbreak had been created by the Health Department to persuade Somali parents to vaccinate.” The women were never identified. Wakefield, meanwhile, told the Post he’d visited the Somali community there only after they became concerned about autism among their children. “The Somalis had decided themselves that they were particularly concerned,” he told the paper. “I was responding to that.”

As for the outbreak, he added, “I don’t feel responsible at all.”

The argument that the government uses medicine to instill cowlike compliance extends well beyond vaccines. For years, Americans have been terrified of fluoride, which some cities started adding to their water supply in 1945. Conspiracies and Secret Societies, a conspiracy-leaning encyclopedia, sums up the most common objection to the practice: the Nazis did it first. “Drinking water containing fluoride was first utilized in Nazi prison camps,” the authors, Brad and Sherry Steiger, write. (The couple also cowrote a number of books about UFOs, werewolves, and the paranormal.) “In the 1930s Hitler and Nazi scientists envisioned world dominion through mass medication of water supplies. A report submitted to the German general staff indicated findings that repeated doses of very small amounts of fluoride would gradually decrease people’s ability to resist domination, slowly narcotizing a certain region of the brain and rendering the individuals submissive to the will of those who wished to govern them.”

That’s all very specific (apart from “a certain region of the brain”), but Holocaust historians say there’s no evidence whatsoever that the claim is true. Patricia Heberer, who specializes in German medical history, including the hideous Nazi experiments, told PolitiFact, “I just can’t see it.” But, Heberer added, she’d heard similar claims during the Cold War about Communists dumping fluoride in the water to narcotize the populace. The American Dental Association—which, as you’d expect, is sturdily pro-fluoride—points out that historical objections to fluoride tend to shift with the times.

“In the 1950s fluoridation was a Communist plot,” according to a surprisingly readable ADA pamphlet on the subject. “With America’s growing concern for environmental issues in the 1960s, fluoridation was pollution. After the Vietnam War in the 1970s, the anti-fluoridationists capitalized on the popularity of conspiracy theories by portraying fluoridation as a conspiracy between the U.S. government, the dental-medical establishment and industry. As Americans became more concerned about their health in the 1980s, anti-fluoridationists claimed fluoridation caused AIDS and Alzheimer’s disease. In the 1990s, claims of fluoride causing hip fractures and cancer were designed to resonate with aging baby boomers. With the new millennium, overexposure and toxicity, in association with lead and arsenic poisoning, have surfaced as common themes.”

Underlying these changing concerns is one constant: fear of the heavy, strangling hand of government control. Mandatory vaccine laws and such measures as putting fluoride in the water are unquestionably good for public health, but they tend to create a noticeable backfire effect, confirming people’s beliefs in an overbearing government. Just to complicate things, it is also true that the government has engaged in very real, disturbing medical experimentation on civilians and then covered it up. That includes the widely forgotten yet deeply troubling program of federally funded scientists irradiating thousands of people.

Beginning in 1944 and continuing for the next three decades, in secretive federally backed experiments, thousands of prisoners, terminally ill patients, and disabled children were dosed with radiation, usually derived from plutonium, to test the effects of radioactive contamination. The breadth and cruelty of the program beggar belief: in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a group of children at the Walter Fernald State School in Massachusetts were given both radioactive iron and calcium in their milk and oatmeal, an experiment engineered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in partnership with Quaker Oats, who wanted to use radioactive material to prove that the nutrients in its oatmeal “traveled throughout the body,” according to the New York Times.

In a letter to their parents, the school’s superintendent, Malcolm J. Farrell, said the children would be given a “special diet” in order to study the way the body absorbed iron and vitamins. He did not ask for consent to irradiate their children; instead, the boys involved thought they’d been invited to join a special “science club.”

The radiation doses were fairly low and none of the former Fernald students—wards of the state who were often inaccurately classified as mentally disabled—are reported to have suffered any significant health effects. But the experiment was still appalling: the boys were talked into participating without any idea what they were ingesting, and it’s doubtful they could have refused: until the 1960s, Fernald was known as a brutal place, with meager food and filthy living conditions. One former ward, Fred Boyce, called it “a prison,” and told news outlets he was outraged and disgusted when he later learned he’d been one of the children fed radioactive material. In 1996, Boyce organized a class-action lawsuit with about thirty other former Fernald wards, eventually winning a $1.85 million settlement from MIT and Quaker Oats.

In the mid-1960s through the 1970s, prisoners in the states of Oregon and Washington had their testicles irradiated through a project directly funded by the Atomic Energy Commission, part of a study to determine how much radiation astronauts could be exposed to during missions. Participation in the program was supposedly voluntary—as voluntary as anything can be for a prison inmate—but many of the men who participated later said they had not been told of the long-term risks involved. Some told the Washington Post decades after that they suffered from rashes, lumps, and irritation on their testicles; one said his testicle became fused to his scrotum after the experiments.

Some cases were so bizarre that survivors were taken to be insane when they discussed them. Such was the sad story of Elmer Allen, an African American train porter who lived in the tiny town of Italy, Texas. He had been diagnosed with bone cancer in his left leg in 1947, and, according to his family, was asked by doctors “whether they could inject him with a radioactive trace element.” Allen’s leg was injected, but the procedure didn’t save it; the leg was amputated and taken by researchers at the University of San Francisco, where he was being treated.

In 1973, Elmer and his wife were offered a free trip to New York, told that doctors there wanted to follow up on the success of the 1947 operation two decades later. But as Fredna and Elmer were on their way to New York, they were pulled off the train in Chicago and taken by limousine to the Argonne National Laboratory. Scientists wanted to run tests to see the effect of the radioactive trace on Elmer’s body in the intervening decades. In the process, they found damage in his jawbone that looked like it had been caused by radiation.

In the course of his life, Elmer reportedly struggled with alcoholism and been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. He would tell his neighbors that he’d been used as a “guinea pig” by the government, but they and, for a time, his family, took that to be the ramblings of a disturbed man.

The mystery was finally solved after Elmer died in 1991, when a reporter, Eileen Welsome, found his name along with those of seventeen other people who had also been injected by government scientists at around the same time at hospitals across the country. The injection turned out to be plutonium, and it had no medical benefit: it was part of the Manhattan Project, the federal research into developing nuclear weapons. The people injected with plutonium were all expected to die soon after receiving the plutonium; scientists were using them to test the body’s reaction to exposure to radioactive material.

“The tragic part about Elmer’s story,” Welsome told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! in 2004, “is that nobody believed him.”

Experiments were even carried out on the dead, with bodies being exhumed to test their radiation levels. In those cases, too, families frequently weren’t given enough information about what they were being asked to consent to. In one project in the mid-’50s, Project SUNSHINE, the cadavers of dead infants were exhumed from across Australia and Europe and sent to the United States to test whether a particular radioactive isotope was concentrated in their bones. Their next of kin were not informed.

In a particularly ghoulish detail, Willard Libby, a University of Chicago researcher who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, was quoted in a commission transcript jovially expressing his search for the bodies of dead babies. “I don’t know how to get them,” Libby said, “but I do say that it is a matter of prime importance to get them and particularly in the young age group. So, human samples are of prime importance, and if anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country.”

In all, about four thousand radiation experiments took place during those three decades, according to an advisory committee created in 1994 by Bill Clinton to examine their grim history. Only a handful of victims or their survivors ever got compensation from the government.

Then there is MKUltra, the series of mind-control experiments conducted by the CIA that would challenge the imagination of the most paranoid of conspiracy theorists. Founded in 1947, the CIA was concerned that the Communists had discovered a mind-control drug, which spurred the agency’s efforts to get America into the race. MKUltra was approved in 1953, with a then-enormous budget of $300,000 and a specific mandate to test the efficacy of LSD. Presiding over MKUltra—the umbrella name for one hundred forty-nine bizarre projects designed to test what mind-altering drugs could do for national defense—was Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist and former chief of the CIA’s technical services division. (Gottlieb, a very busy man, was also involved in the CIA’s “gadget shop,” which produced devices aimed at killing Fidel Castro and other inconvenient world leaders.) MKUltra experiments involved testing the drugs on human subjects; in some experiments, the subjects were unaware that they were being drugged. In MKUltra’s first year of operation, an FBI agent named Frank Olson, covertly dosed with LSD, died. The LSD had been mixed in a bottle of Cointreau and offered to the unwitting Olson by Gottlieb; after drinking it, Olson suffered a mental break and, nine days later, threw himself from a tenth-story window. But nothing seemed to slow the program’s bizarre work for long; even then, MKUltra was only halted temporarily.

Some of the MKUltra experiments straddled the line between science and sadism. In one, the agency set up a controlled safe house, where sex workers were instructed to dose their clients, who were then observed from behind two-way mirrors. The project was dubbed Operation Midnight Climax, which makes it sound as if everyone involved in creating it was having a good time. CIA operatives soon leaped beyond the bounds of the safe house: people were dosed with LSD, marijuana, and other drugs in restaurants and bars and on the beach. A CIA source speaking to author John Marks told him, “If we were scared enough of a drug not to try it out on ourselves, we sent it to San Francisco.”

Most of the MKUltra records were deliberately destroyed by the government in 1973. According to a contemporaneous report in the New York Times, that was done to hide evidence of possible criminal wrongdoing, including Sidney Gottlieb’s personal involvement in the death of Frank Olson. The project only came to public attention in 1975, as a result of two government actions: the Church Committee—a Senate Select Committee assigned to look into spying by the CIA, NSA, and FBI on both foreign leaders and US citizens, which found widespread examples of harassment of political activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr.—and the President’s Commission on CIA Activities in the United States, commissioned by Gerald Ford. (Even then, it took investigative stories by Seymour Hersh at the New York Times and other journalists to expose the worst of the outrages, as well as the destruction of records.) The CIA called MKUltra a shameful chapter in its history, never to be repeated, but its shadow was not easily dispelled. Concerns about government mind control are so entrenched as to be the subject of jokes; the original idea of a tinfoil hat, after all, is to keep the government from beaming its rays of influence into one’s brain.

Gottlieb, meanwhile, never faced any consequences for his work with the CIA—why would he?—and upon retiring, moved to India for eighteen months with his wife to run a leper colony, according to a New York Times obituary. From there, he bought a cabin in Virginia, tried unsuccessfully to start a commune, and focused his time on folk dancing and herding goats along with, as the Times put it dryly, “consciousness-raising and fighting lawsuits from survivors of his secret tests.” He died at eighty. Secretive to the last, his wife declined to disclose his cause of death.

The army, too, experimented with the effects of psychedelic drugs, hoping they could be used during interrogations. Its experiments also sometimes involved unwitting human subjects. One of the more notorious episodes came to light after the death of Harold Blauer, a renowned tennis player, who was receiving inpatient treatment for depression at the New York Psychiatric Institute. The institute had an agreement with the Army Chemical Corps to secretly administer drugs to patients to study their effects. Blauer was given five doses of mescaline derivatives intravenously over a period of several weeks. On January 8, 1953, after he received his fifth and final injection, according to notes from the experiment, Blauer started to sweat profusely and flail his arms. His body stiffened as he began frothing at the mouth; within two hours, he’d lapsed into a coma. Not long after, he was dead.

The true nature of Blauer’s death only came to light in the 1970s, when an unrelated congressional inquiry turned up records about the mescaline injections, and Blauer’s family was notified. His oldest daughter sued the federal government and in 1987 she and her sister were awarded $700,000. In his ruling, the judge called Blauer a “guinea pig” and noted that his medical records were falsified to disguise the cause of his death, attributing it to a weak heart. Indeed, the army, in cooperation with the state of New York and the federal government, covered up the experiments at the Psychiatric Institute for twenty-two years. The investigation and subsequent lawsuits also revealed that the same day Blauer died, a twenty-one-year-old woman at the institute had been injected with the same drug and had a violent negative reaction, though she didn’t die.

In most of these historical cases, the human rights abuses committed weren’t acknowledged by the government until its hand was forced—by activists, journalists, or lawsuits. Even then, such agencies as the FBI and politicians tend to insist that the incidents were a regrettable oversight, a surprising breach of an otherwise ethical system. “When the government does wrong, we have a moral responsibility to admit it,” Bill Clinton said in a 1995 speech, apologizing to victims of radiation experiments. “The duty we owe to one another to tell the truth and to protect our fellow citizens from excesses like these is one we can never walk away from.” Yet we have managed to walk away from it, repeatedly.

The—sometimes justifiable—paranoia about government control in medicine has also led to the conviction that the government has deliberately suppressed or withheld real cures for disease. Nowhere is that more evident than in the history of laetrile, a quack cancer cure making a startling comeback.

There is a centuries-long saga of curious cures claiming to beat cancer: a 1914 medical text called The Cancer Problem lists some of them, including green frogs attached to the body like leeches, the liver of a tortoise “laid on the cancer continuously,” and a horrid-sounding concoction made of “crow’s feet, dog fennel, sulphur, and arsenic.” Turpentine and kerosene were both used in the 1950s, and so was a discredited drug called krebiozen, which subsequent analyses showed contained only a common amino acid called creatine mixed with mineral oil.

None of those products took hold quite like laetrile, however, which was originally developed in the early 1920s and patented in the 1940s by Ernst Krebs, Sr., a California physician, and his son, Ernst Krebs, Jr. The two claimed that amygdalin, a chemical compound found in apricot seeds, had anticancer properties (a claim that scientists and researchers had periodically been making since the mid-1800s). Amygdalin is also found in bitter almond, apple, and plum seeds, and Krebs Sr. reportedly discovered its miraculous properties while tinkering at home, trying to find “a method for improving the taste of bootleg whiskey,” according to Dr. Irving Lerner, who in the 1980s wrote a history of laetrile’s use. (Laetrile was the trade name for the chemical compound they created.)

There was one small drawback. The other thing those pits contain is cyanide. That means laetrile, as several studies would later discover, can have side effects that mimic cyanide poisoning. Those include liver damage, nausea, vomiting, blue skin due to lack of oxygen in the blood, low blood pressure, fever, coma, and death.

Krebs Sr. began selling laetrile as a remedy for cancer, for which he was arrested in 1962 and then in 1966 and fined $4,000. He died in 1970, but his son carried on his work, crucially refining the message about what exactly laetrile did. Krebs Jr. came to claim that cancer was, contrary to all established science, a vitamin deficiency and that amygdalin, in laetrile, supplied the missing vitamin, which he called “vitamin B17.” (He also dubbed himself a doctor and a biochemist, despite having no medical degree.) There is no such thing as vitamin B17, but Krebs Jr. made his claims at a felicitous time. As Lerner points out, it was during the Watergate crisis, and suspicions of government were at their height. The trend in favor of natural foods, healing crystals, and astrology was just taking off. And, crucially, calling amygdalin a vitamin rather than a drug took advantage of the new public interest in vitamins and meant that Krebs didn’t need to seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

In 1972, Krebs Jr. set up clinics in Mexico and West Germany peddling laetrile. Patients touted a wonder drug that shrank their tumors. And Dr. John Richardson, a friend of his and a member of the John Birch Society, began prescribing it out of his US office, to disastrous effect: his practice was raided that year, and he was arrested, charged, and stripped of his medical license. His prosecution was the spark that formed the Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy, set up by a group of Birchers in defense of medical freedom (Maureen Kennedy Salaman and her husband Frank, who figured prominently in the committee, also happened to be mother and stepfather to Sean David Morton, the UFO expert turned redemption theorist and fellow traveler on the Conspira-Sea cruise).

Soon after, a number of the committee members, including Frank Salaman and Richardson, were caught attempting to smuggle laetrile into the United States; they were each convicted and ordered to pay thousands in fines. Undaunted, the group pushed for state-by-state legalization of laetrile, and pressured the National Cancer Institute to authorize tests of its efficacy. The job of testing fell to Dr. Kanematsu Sugiura, a biochemist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, who found a startling result: in preliminary tests on mice, laetrile did seem to inhibit metastases of lung cancer.

Sloan-Kettering, according to a New York Times report, found the data interesting but hardly persuasive and asked for more testing. However, someone surreptitiously released Sugiura’s tests to a laetrile activist, who sent them on to the Committee for Freedom of Choice. They published the findings, claiming a drastic and nefarious governmental cover-up. In the group’s self-published newsletter, The Choice, they blasted the vicious “Fedstapo” and its war against cancer patients.

Additional studies failed to replicate Sugiura’s exciting results; there is, to date, no proof that laetrile works any better than a placebo. Thousands of people took the pill anyway, including actor Steve McQueen, who ventured to Mexico to acquire it from a border clinic the year he died of mesothelioma. Meanwhile, as federal law banned the import of laetrile and made it illegal to ship it across state lines, twelve states voted to legalize it for use within their borders.

Despite the inconclusive results, people desperately wanted to be able to take the drug without having to leave the country. In 1976, a terminal cancer patient from Oklahoma, Glen Rutherford, filed suit against the FDA, arguing that if he waited for the agency to test laetrile, he might be dead by the time it finished. Rutherford’s suit, in effect, demanded that terminal patients be allowed access to unproven drugs and last-ditch treatments, and it worked: a federal judge ruled in his favor.

In 1977, as the controversy raged, the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research called a hearing on laetrile, chaired by Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Representatives from the FDA, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Cancer Society all declared, again, that there was no evidence that laetrile worked. Representatives from the prosecutor’s office in San Francisco also testified, pointing out that laetrile proponents were making a lot of money from the drug, particularly in California. One California doctor submitted affidavits on nineteen of his patients who he said had died after they chose laetrile against his medical advice.

Then it was the laetrilists’ turn, who managed to turn the hearing into a large, showy, and successful display of the power of a grassroots organization against the evil medical establishment. “With a j’accuse flair,” the New York Times reported, “they spoke of a government ‘conspiracy’ to hold back a ‘valid’ anticancer substance from the public; they condemned the Establishment for arrogantly denying cancer victims the right to freely choose their mode of treatment; they argued that Laetrile is harmless and that in many cases it might do some good when taken as part of a total dietary and vitamin program.” The laetrile supporters claimed that the drug gave them relief from pain and even remission in the disease, and they waved affidavits to prove it. “One speaker went so far as to compare the advent of Laetrile in the cancer field to the Copernican revolution,” the Times added, “which changed man’s view of his role in the universe.”

The FDA maintained its federal ban on transporting laetrile across state lines, but by 1977, twenty-seven states had legalized its use. And vitamin B17 also got a renewed boost in 1978, when G. Edward Griffin, the most important conspiracy theorist you’ve never heard of, dubbed it a miracle cure.

Griffin is the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, an influential doorstop of a book that accuses the Federal Reserve of being a globalist tool used to enslave US citizens. He also authored the popular World Without Cancer, which spread the story of the so-called Sloan-Kettering cover-up and baldly accused the government and mainstream medicine of suppressing laetrile out of greed. Their desire to keep treating cancer forever with costly and profit-driving drugs was greater than their desire for a healthy world, he argued.

Griffin was careful not to accuse the medico-political cabal of outright genocide, though, writing, “Men of finance and politics do not have to be members of a global cabal to decide to oppose Laetrile or vitamin therapy; and it is certain that they do not consciously seek to commit genocide by thwarting a line of research that they know will lead to life-saving discoveries.” Instead, he added, “What has happened in this field is the result of forces and policies previously set in motion in the quest of economic and political goals. Their organizations and institutions react reflexively against any obstacle to profits. The result is a scientific quagmire which now is claiming millions of lives each year.”

By the late 1970s, the Committee for Freedom of Choice claimed to have thirty-five thousand members, including two thousand doctors who were allowed to prescribe laetrile to patients who got a referral from the group. The FDA subsequently declared laetrile not just illegal to transport across state lines, but flat-out illegal, a decision that was fought by several states but ultimately upheld in federal court.

Laetrile use began to die off in 1981, when a federally funded clinical trial found, once again, that it was worthless. Of the one hundred seventy-eight patients studied, one hundred five died. A few reported feeling better seven months after completing their treatment, but follow-ups found that cancers had continued growing in all those patients who were still alive at that point. The study also found that several patients showed “symptoms of cyanide toxicity” or “blood cyanide levels approaching the lethal range,” the authors wrote. In response, the Committee for Freedom of Choice contended that the doctors had used the wrong kind of amygdalin.

Clinics in Mexico that prescribe laetrile and other discredited or untested cures are still open. A long-running group called the Cancer Control Society leads tours there at least three times a year. And in 2017, both Buzzfeed and ABC ran stories noting that laetrile had made a startling resurgence. Buzzfeed reporter Stephanie M. Lee found dozens of online vendors selling apricot seeds, although they were careful to avoid claiming powers of treatment or cure for any disease. The customers make those claims, writing such testimonials as, “Raw Apricot Kernels help to stop Cancer in its tracks.”

The sale of these products continues in spite of the FDA ban because the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, passed in 1994, specifically exempts vitamins and supplements from the kind of scrutiny to which the FDA subjects drugs before they’re put on the market. The FDA can warn the public about dangerous products and it sends aggressive warning letters to companies claiming that amygdalin, B17, or laetrile are cancer treatments, but that’s about all it can do: most websites selling the products just change the name or the descriptions to make them sufficiently vague.

To this day, popular natural-health websites feed into the conspiratorial claims about laetrile not being approved for cancer treatment in the United States. Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician and vaccine “skeptic,” writes that it’s all part of the greedy medical-industrial complex, and that in fact “science” itself is suspect. “Our current medical system,” he wrote, “has been masterfully orchestrated by the drug companies to create a system that gives the perception of science-based medicine when it is really a heavily manipulated process designed to boost their profits, and more accurately labeled science-biased medicine.”

The FDA has its hands full combating such claims, because the problem does not stop with laetrile. In April 2017, the agency released a public warning about a whopping sixty-five different bogus cancer drugs being sold online, many of them making explicit claims such as “miraculously kills cancer cells in tumors,” “more effective than chemotherapy,” and “treats all forms of cancer.” The products are frequently touted as “natural” and therefore appear to be safe. Some of the more recognizable ingredients are powdered vitamin C, milk thistle, and “Siberian Chaga Mushroom Extract.”

There is also a particularly pernicious skin cancer “treatment” called Indian Black Salve that is advertised on natural-health websites: it’s a thick black paste that burns the skin away, leaving ropey black scars. It is aggressively promoted as being alluringly “natural,” a Native American remedy, redolent with the wisdom of the ages. One company selling the salve calls itself Two Feathers, and it writes lovingly about how this “unique formula” is “a time capsule sent to us from a distant past when knowledge was more of the Spirit than of the intellect.” The product is purportedly produced in “the original Native American manner,” cured in smoke ovens, and mixed in wooden (never metal) bowls, none of which equips it to fight cancer, but which must sound reassuring to people desperate for hope.

A great many people are making money off these bogus cures—thousands of small operators and fly-by-night companies, which, when confronted by the FDA, change their names, shift their marketing language ever so slightly, and begin again. The big business of bullshit cure-alls targets customers on every side of the political spectrum.

The king of dubious health claims is Alex Jones, whose InfoWars Life Health Store sells a variety of supplements ranging from the harmless to the profoundly dodgy. Most of Jones’s products come from a Houston-based company called the Global Healing Center and are relabeled with the InfoWars logo. Global Healing Center’s CEO, Dr. Edward Group, is also Jones’s go-to health expert, appearing regularly on the program to opine about vaccines (he thinks they’re bad) and fungus (the root of all evil—luckily, one of the supplements that Jones and Group sell helps banish it from the body).

Group isn’t a medical doctor but a chiropractor, although his website claims a string of other credentials, like degrees from MIT and Harvard, where he attended continuing education programs that are virtually impossible to fail provided you pay the bill on time. Until a few years ago, Group also claimed to have a medical degree from the Joseph LaFortune School of Medicine. The LaFortune School is based in Haiti and is not accredited. That one is no longer on his CV.

Several disgruntled Global Healing Center staff members spoke to me for a 2017 Jezebel story about Group and Jones’s relationship, claiming that the company earns millions a year while toeing an extremely fine line in making claims for its products. “Global Healing Center pretends to care about FDA and FTC regulation but at the end of the day, GHC says a lot of things that are completely fabricated, flat-out incorrect, totally circumstantial, or based on incomplete evidence,” one employee said.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the claims that Jones and Group make about colloidal silver, which Jones sells as Silver Bullet. Colloidal silver is a popular New Age health product, touted as a miraculous antibacterial and antimicrobial agent that is dabbed on the skin. But Group and Jones advocate drinking the stuff. In 2014, Group told the InfoWars audience that he’s been doing so for years. “I’ve drank half a gallon of silver, done a ten parts per million silver, for probably ten or fifteen days,” Group said reassuringly.

Group also claims that the FDA “raided” his office to steal his colloidal silver, because it is too powerful. “It was one of the things that was targeted by the FDA because it was a threat to the pharmaceutical companies and a threat for doctor’s visits because it worked so good in the body.”

Colloidal silver doesn’t, in fact, work so good in the body; you’re not supposed to put it there. The Mayo Clinic says silver has “no known purpose in the body” and drinking colloidal silver can cause argyria, a condition that can permanently turn skin, eyes, and internal organs an ashen bluish color. (Jones and Group acknowledge on InfoWars that this can happen, but only when people are using silver incorrectly.)

Of all the conspiracy medical sites, Natural News is the most conspiracy-minded and far-reaching, with an audience that, according to the web analytics site Alexa, may be larger than Gwyneth Paltrow’s New Age lifestyle site Goop (web traffic is proprietary information, but Alexa shows that Natural News has a higher global ranking than Goop, an indicator of their relative popularity). Natural News was founded and run by Mike Adams, the self-appointed Health Ranger, who boasts more than one hundred thousand Twitter followers. Adams was born in Kansas and says that he cured himself of various maladies using natural remedies and a raw-food diet. His site is an overlap of anti-government paranoia and bogus health claims, espousing conspiracies about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, September 11, Sandy Hook, and Hillary Clinton’s health in between dispensing intensely, feverishly false health advice.

Echoing G. Edward Griffin decades before him, Adams has claimed, for example, that chemotherapy “actually causes cancer to spread throughout the body,” but that our medical overlords are covering this up: “The medical industrial complex can’t sustain their billion-dollar-a-year cancer business if they blame the real culprit,” by which he meant chemo itself. (He recommends preventing cancer by drinking baking soda daily, along with regular ingestions of hemp oil, cinnamon, and garlic supplements. He also warns against tap water, saying that fluoride causes cancer.)

Jones, Adams, and their ilk complain that they are under attack by the media, the government, and some shadowy third entities for telling truths too powerful to ignore. In the summer of 2017, Adams said that someone had subjected his website to a “massive, well-funded, multi-nation DDoS attack” in response to a petition he began to “end legal immunity” for vaccine manufacturers; he blamed the CDC, which he called “a known criminal organization and pillar of the deep state that functions as the vaccine propaganda branch of the pharmaceutical industry.”

Unusually, medical conspiracy thinking is not solely the province of the far-right or the Libertarian bluish-from-too-much-silver fringe. The bourgeois hippie left participates, too. The website Quartz published an astonishing story showing that many of the products sold by Jones are identical to those peddled by Goop. And there’s David “Avocado” Wolfe, another New Age lifestyle vlogger, who has called vaccine manufacturers “criminal and Satanic” and said that chemtrails are real and toxic. (“Chemtrails” are actually contrails, or water vapor from airplanes, which people in the deep end of the conspiracy pool think are clouds of poison gas being showered on the populace to, once again, make us docile and weak.)

It is only fair to note, however, that every one of these people—Jones, Paltrow, the Avocado man—have been made prominent by the Internet, but they are also rigorously fact-checked because of it. Alex Jones has been subjected to a very thorough investigation of his claims, particularly since the 2016 election, when his friendship with Donald Trump gave him an enormous boost in public attention. Goop is regularly skewered by doctors, including Dr. Jen Gunter, a gynecologist who takes great joy in wryly puncturing the site’s weirder assertions about vaginal health, such as the benefits of jade “yoni” eggs for vaginal toning. (That particular claim also cost Goop money: in September 2018, the Orange County, California, District Attorney’s office said that two types of vaginal eggs offered by the website, as well as an essential oil blend, had all been sold using unproven and unfounded claims. Goop agreed to settle for $145,000 and give refunds to anyone who purchased an egg or the oil blend.)

But it’s difficult to figure out whether the two sides balance each other out, whether the scrutiny bestowed by the Internet is equal to the new set of consumers it potentially introduces to Goop or InfoWars products. And when people follow the advice of Alex Jones or the Health Ranger or Paltrow’s Goop, it may not only be their wasted money at risk. In October 2017, a nonprofit watchdog group, the Center for Environmental Health, independently tested two InfoWars supplements—Caveman True Paleo Formula and Myco-ZX—and found high levels of lead in both. Myco-ZX is meant to rid the body of “harmful organisms,” and it is one of InfoWars’ most heavily marketed products.

“It is not only ironic, but tragic, when we find lead in dietary supplements, since consumers are ingesting the toxic chemical with every sip and swallow,” CEH CEO Michael Green said in a press release. “These products are supposed to enhance human health and performance,” Green added, “not lead to increased risk of heart attacks and sperm damage.”

Morton knew he was being investigated by the SEC as early as 2007, Delphi newsletters show, and in 2009 he attempted to sue the agency, arguing that its agents were harassing him and Melissa so that they could go on taxpayer-funded trips to California where, he charged, they alternated between bullying the couple, visiting Disneyland, and making runs to In-N-Out Burger. The lawsuit was dismissed and the Mortons lost their SEC case as well. In February 2013, they were ordered to pay $11.5 million to the SEC within fourteen days.

They didn’t pay. Instead, Morton essentially wrote the government an IOU for $50 million, instructing them to withdraw the money from the Federal Reserve, another tactic favored by redemption theorists. He insisted that had taken care of the matter and successfully shaken the feds off his back. Life seemed to return to normal. He started hosting an Internet-based radio show every afternoon called Strange Universe, ruminating on taxes and UFOs with equal verve.

Meanwhile, Morton had dipped a toe into redemption theory and was heading deeper into those waters. The turning point was a lecture given by Brandon Adams at a New Age bookstore and event space in Los Angeles called the Living Temple where Morton heard about some novel methods for getting out of debt. Adams and his business partner, Gordon Hall, a brash, Trumpish real estate developer and gym impresario, had set up a company called Creditors In Commerce that drew up fake money orders for their clients to send to the IRS.

Adams comes from a family of redemption theorists, very prolific ones: they advanced far beyond Roger Elvick’s basic ideas of how to reclaim one’s straw man and started experimenting with their own ideas about how to eke money out of the federal government and avoid paying taxes. At one time, his father, Alexander, his brother, Garrett, and he were all in the business of preparing falsified tax returns using phony money orders. Then, through Creditors In Commerce, Adams and Hall sent the IRS fake payments amounting to a whopping $93 million. The money orders did not actually discharge anyone’s debt—surprise—and Hall, who already had previous fraud and racketeering convictions dating from financial entanglements with the mob, was sentenced to ninety-six months in prison while Brandon was given a forty-month sentence. In a press release, the Justice Department said the men had met at “various seminars associated with the sovereign citizen movement.”

You would think that seeing Adams troop off to prison would act as a deterrent, but it didn’t seem to work that way for Morton. He began to use a system to evade debt that relies on something called a 1099 OID form. OID stands for “original issue discount,” and a 1099 OID form is used to report to the IRS the interest expected on bonds or other financial instruments that won’t mature for at least a year. Redemption theorists believe that OID forms function something like an IOU from the government. If a person sends one to a creditor, such as a bank or a credit card company, in the amount that’s owed, the creditor can then reclaim the money from the Treasury. Redemption theorists also believe that a 1099 OID can provide direct access to a person’s straw-man account—by reporting huge expected earnings from future interest, a person filing taxes can claim a sizable tax refund from the IRS.

In the Mortons’ case, they had reported various kinds of income on 1099 OID forms, according to the IRS. In documents filed with the court, it looks as if they simply reported their credit card debt as income. They also reported large withholdings from income that they hadn’t earned to claim a refund from the IRS.

At least once, these schemes worked: in 2008, the IRS mistakenly issued Sean a refund of $480,323. According to the Justice Department, “the couple took immediate steps to conceal the money” on the same day the refund was deposited into their joint account, which involved “opening two new accounts, transferring over $360,000 to the two new accounts, and withdrawing $70,000 in cash.”

The Justice Department claimed that when the IRS tried to take back the mistaken refund “the Mortons began a campaign to thwart the government’s collection efforts.” Melissa, for example, claimed that the joint account was hers alone. (At various points, she also listed herself on Facebook as single; perhaps part of a plan or simply some unrelated marital tension.) The IRS was also reportedly presented with “various ‘coupons’ and ‘bonds’ that purported to pay off the Mortons’ debt.” In essence, Morton did what he’d done years before with the SEC: instructed the government to pull money out of the Treasury to pay what he owed. And he sold the same bond scheme to others who owed money to the IRS, the state of California, or credit card or mortgage companies, filing paperwork on their behalf that the FBI described as “useless.”

Morton, for his part, says he was just fighting gross injustice. “There’s a huge inequity in society,” he told me. “People are just being raped by the banks. If you really want to know why I got into it, I wanted to help kids with student loans.” And that the charges are all made up. “It’s all inchoate offenses. It’s all imaginary,” he insisted. “They will not be able to produce a single original piece of evidence,” he said confidently. “Nor will they be able to produce a single person that we’ve harmed.” He was fairly sure the case would never actually go to trial.

In this, Morton’s prediction was wrong. The trial began on an unremarkable sunny April day in Los Angeles in Judge Stephen V. Wilson’s courtroom. The Mortons silently took a seat at a long table with Melissa’s attorney, Steve Brody. Sean had chosen to represent himself, filing dozens of motions before the trial began that the judge called “utterly devoid of merit” and “frivolous.” He refused to attend a pretrial conference or call any witnesses in his own defense, and on day one he also objected to the jury hearing the full indictment against him and his wife.

“It would be prejudicial for them to hear that many lies all at once,” he told the judge. Morton chuckled. No one else did.

Over the course of the trial, Morton looked cocky, exasperated, infuriated, and, by the end, in a state of shock and close to panic. Watching him was a surreal experience: it took him, in my view, a startlingly long time to realize how much trouble he was in. He was in weirdly good spirits, singing “King of Pain” by the Police as he took the stand until he was reprimanded by a bailiff. At various points he laughed as he watched himself in YouTube videos shown to the jury. Melissa appeared blandly pleasant and impassive. In fact, she was mild and near-silent most of the time. In contrast to her husband’s colorful peacock persona, Melissa reminded me of a Sunday school teacher or, frankly, a sister-wife in a sunny fundamentalist fantasy. In their free time, I know from social media, the two of them raised show cats, pampered longhaired creatures with their own bedroom, which the IRS raided in an attempt to find various tax documents.

One morning, as the trial was getting under way, Melissa stopped in front of me, resplendent in a puffy pink sweater. I looked up in surprise. “You do not have permission to use my name or likeness,” she said very sweetly, in an even tone. “And no comment.” As she walked away, I called after her with something like “Ms. Morton, that’s not how it works!” She didn’t turn around.

Melissa remained a mystery to the judge and jury, too. The prosecution focused most of its case on Sean, but noted that Melissa had certainly participated, sending out paperwork and talking to clients by phone. Brody, her lawyer, wanted to separate Melissa’s actions as much as possible from her husband’s. It seemed difficult to do. “Is your argument that she was the dutiful wife and he was the decision-maker?” Judge Wilson asked him at one point, outside the presence of the jury. During his testimony, Morton let drop that Melissa previously worked for a bank, which would—you would think—mean that she knew just how foolhardy the OID form scheme was. Brody moved for a mistrial at that moment, arguing that the tidbit was impossibly prejudicial to the jury, but Wilson denied it.

Over five days of testimony, a string of witnesses—bank and credit card company employees, mostly—explained that the Mortons, on behalf of themselves and their clients, tried filing 1099 OID forms as well as exotic financial instruments they weren’t permitted to use, like Treasury offset forms. Also testifying was Ted Lepkojus, a retired IRS agent whose job is pursuing what he gently terms “unpaid tax cases,” who also admitted that he and other IRS agents use aliases to investigate people like the Mortons. (The IRS declined to answer questions about that. For years, much of Morton’s income was derived from giving workshops, first in ESP, and later in straw man and redemption theory tactics. I’d been present at a few of his seminars, and while the information presented ranged from nonsense to flatly illegal, they were usually full of people busily taking notes. After the trial concluded, it occurred to me that some of them might have been undercover agents from the IRS.)

The agents’ use of an alias only reinforces the redemption theorists’ sense of taxes as an illicit enterprise. Although redemption theory targets desperate people, it also takes advantage of two facts: the tax code is impossibly, impenetrably hard to understand; and there is always someone, somewhere who has found a way to beat it. Anyone who knows that corporations and millionaires often end up paying very little in taxes is primed to find that argument persuasive. In court, Morton himself tried to tap into Americans’ fundamental distrust of financial institutions. “We’re swimming in debt,” he told the courtroom. “All of us. We’re being crushed by two organizations. Look who we’re going up against today: it’s the banks and their surrogates, the Internal Revenue Service.” He described the banking system and the IRS as “two of the most malicious and pernicious organizations on the planet,” which is not, honestly, an unreasonable or unsympathetic argument.

Morton’s logic was persuasive: Barbara Lavender, a victim of his scheme, had paid the Mortons $2,500 to help get her out of debt. Lavender and her husband had debts amounting to $48,000 when she was laid off from work; the amount ballooned to $70,000, and they were getting desperate. Her husband saw Morton speak at a conference and came home with one last-ditch idea. Lavender didn’t think what she was doing was illegal: “I thought the bank would accept the OID form as a method of payment.”

“Did it seem strange to you that you could get rid of $70,000 in debt by paying $2,500?” a prosecutor asked Lavender. “I suppose when you put it that way, it does,” she said, sounding a little abashed. “But I honestly thought he’d found a loophole. You hear it all the time, that wealthy people have their tax loopholes. I was heading into retirement, and I was willing to give it a try.”

As his own lawyer, Morton got to question and cross-examine witnesses, a task he clearly relished. At one point, he was face-to-face with Luke Yoo, an IRS agent who had raided his home. The IRS seized computers, tax documents, and the Mortons’ marriage license. Sean maintained that they kicked in the couple’s door, entered with guns drawn, and dragged Melissa, recovering from knee surgery, out of bed. (The IRS says they knocked.)

“How many on your team were dressed like jackbooted Nazis?” he asked Yoo, raising his voice. “Did you witness them assault my wife, take her wheelchair, and throw it across the room? Did you photograph the physical assault on my wife?” (Yoo responded that he’d been covering the operation from outside and hadn’t witnessed anything in particular.)

When it was his turn to testify in his own defense, Morton took the stand with tiny glasses perched on his nose and a thick sheaf of notes and delivered a long monologue—his version of the magic words—meant to stop the trial in its tracks. “Be seated and answer questions,” Judge Wilson ordered him, cutting through Morton’s declamations of “in good faith I do move” and “in violation of rights.” Reluctantly, Morton sat.

Crucially, the trial sought to determine whether the Mortons knowingly broke the law, whether they genuinely believed that OID forms could be used in the way that they tried, and whether Morton chose selectively to avail himself of US citizenship, which would undercut the sincerity of his positions.

As Judge Wilson told the jury, “ultimately, one of the things you’ll have to decide is whether or not Morton had a good faith belief in what he did. Crimes require a specific intent and bad faith, a bad motive. Good faith is a defense. So, I’m not going to allow him to tell you what the law is or how the banking system works because he hasn’t established—at least in my view—his qualifications to do that. But he can, if he wishes, tell you what he believes the system involved and what the law was when he did the things he did.”

And Morton did. He knew nothing about the 1099 OID process before meeting Adams, he testified. “I was a spiritual guy who was writing spiritual newsletters.” He truly believed that Adams’s system was “a legitimate process under the law.” He added, “I never, ever, ever in any of this thought that I was breaking the law. I thought this was the law. I thought everything we were doing was absolutely legal.”

But Morton’s own picture of himself shifted, from insisting he knew nothing—a spiritual, naive innocent—to painting himself as nothing less than a financial freedom fighter. “I still firmly believe,” he told the jury, “even though I have all this evidence to the contrary, that there’s hope for us. There’s got to be some kind of system to offset the crushing debt that the banks put us all under—that there’s some way to stand up to them and be a hero.”

It got worse for Morton when Assistant United States Attorney Valerie Makarewicz started to ask her questions. Makarewicz, who was in the Tax Division of the Southern District of California, was personally sued in civil court by Morton before the criminal trial began, along with another government attorney, James Hughes. The two were accused of a battery of very strange things: fraud was the most legible accusation, followed by “malicious legal processes.” A few other things were thrown into a voluminous thirty-nine-page complaint: accusations that the attorneys acted as foreign agents, that they failed to post photographs of their bar cards as required by law, and probably ten or twenty other items I missed. Every paragraph is a logical and grammatical and punctuational adventure. Morton identifies himself and Melissa as “of the Morton hacienda,” and every page was inscribed with the words “In the Name of Our Heavenly Father.”

Makarewicz intended, as quickly as possible, to get Morton to admit that he behaved like a citizen of this country when it suited him.

“Are you a citizen of the United States?” she asked him directly.

“That’s a hard question to answer,” he told her placidly. “Under the Fourteenth Amendment, I consider myself a citizen of California and an American national.”

The Fourteenth Amendment is the one that says anyone born or naturalized in the United States is a citizen of the United States and the state where they reside. It holds a special place in the cosmology of sovereign citizens: many believe they can formally renounce the first part, that which makes them a federal citizen, while keeping their state allegiance intact.

The jury didn’t know of any of this: they just watched, brows furrowed, as Morton declined to respond to something that probably looked simple.

“Your honor,” Makarewicz said, a little exasperated. “Please ask the witness to answer the question.”

“Again, I’m a citizen of the state of California, the sovereign people of California and an American national,” Morton said.

“Do you reside in the United States, sir?” Makarewicz asked icily.

“There’s different definitions,” Morton said, smiling faintly. “Can you define the United States for me?”

Makarewicz looked at Judge Wilson, who verbally shrugged back at her. “I can’t go any further,” he said. “You’ve asked the question and he’s given the answer.”

Makarewicz got Morton to admit that he hasn’t filed a California state tax return since 2000. She also tried to get him to admit that he enjoyed the “benefits of being a US citizen,” as she put it.

“You enjoy the benefits of the US military, don’t you?” she asked.

“California has a national guard and local police,” Morton shot back. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been protected by the US military.”

Makarewicz got Morton to admit that he drove to court on a public road, that he used state water and sewer systems, and that he’s used the state court system.

“You sued me,” she reminded him.

“I did, because you wouldn’t answer my questions about what’s the jurisdiction you have under the Sixth Amendment,” Morton informed her. “And how come I’m not facing a plaintiff here today.”

Makarewicz also asked if Morton had a passport, an answer that perhaps gave her more than she anticipated.

“I’ve had diplomatic passports from countries and nation states that we’re attempting to start,” he told her. (One of them was called the Republic of New Lemuria; starting ersatz countries is another sovereign practice.) “As an ambassador I was immune from filling out tax ID numbers,” he added. Makarewicz almost imperceptibly shook her head, as if to get a gnat out of her ear.

Makarewicz came to the trial seemingly irate at Morton for having sued her, but in truth she and her co-prosecutor could have had it much worse than a tiny, easily swattable lawsuit in civil court. As noted, sovereigns and redemption theorists regularly file liens against court officers and law enforcement officials as a method of retaliation. In 2013, for example, a Minneapolis couple named Thomas and Lisa Eilertson filed a whopping $250 billion in liens against various government employees, an act of revenge after their home had been foreclosed in 2009. Their targets included the local sheriff, the county registrar, various court employees, and attorneys for the county. “It affects your credit rating, it affected my wife, it affected my children,” Sheriff Richard Stanek told the New York Times, referring to the liens. “We spent countless hours trying to undo it.”

The tactic is referred to as “paper terrorism” (and Morton himself has jocularly referred to himself as a “paper terrorist”). It takes advantage of the fact that anyone at all can file a lien under the Uniform Commercial Code. Though invalid liens can be cleared up, it can take a very long time. Some states have made it a felony to file fraudulent documents to retaliate against government officials, and some places give secretaries of state more discretion in whether to accept a lien filing, but the system remains pretty piecemeal.

Even though Morton didn’t file a lien, suing the attorneys who are prosecuting you seems like a good way to earn a specially heaping portion of their ire. But it also illustrates something fairly central about redemption theorists: they recognize the legitimacy of some institutions—like the court system—when it suits them, and try to use it to their advantage.

Morton can elicit fury and disgust for promoting a misleading set of promises to desperate and broke customers. Indeed, during her questioning, Makarewicz noted that at least twice, Morton had charged families $2,500 to get their loved ones out of prison using some version of his bond scheme. Both times he failed, and both prisoners were still very much locked up. Redemption theory can feel like a thin legitimation for greed and a desire to live outside the law, an unwillingness to follow rules the rest of us have agreed to live by. It’s not like I enjoy paying my taxes.

At the same time, though, Morton’s crimes are a tiny droplet in the vast, dark ocean that is American economic Darwinism and financial cruelty. Morton was correct that the system is stacked against ordinary Americans: the subprime mortgage crisis forced millions from their homes while the banks were assiduously bailed out; millionaires were allowed to flee from the mess they created with the sturdiest of golden parachutes. Our state protections are so weak, our safety net so threadbare, that it is hard to condemn people who seek a way out, even an illegal one.

Indeed, some people do believe in the redemption system: one witness stepped forward, Carol Lee Meyer, who insisted that Morton’s plan worked, that he saved her home from foreclosure. (Makarewicz gently pointed out that the bank was still trying to seize her home and that she had to file for bankruptcy. Morton’s bond process might have slowed and tangled the process, the way that phony filings sometimes do, but Meyer was almost certainly going to lose her house.)

And Sean Morton, especially, belongs to a long and colorful tradition of American hucksters, seekers, and strivers, a traveling salesman with a paper blend of snake oil. When I looked at him, I could lower my blood pressure by thinking of medicine shows and quack cures as forms of national eccentricity. He was often hard to demonize, with his weird blazers and their pocket crests, his obvious joy when he talks about aliens (at other times, when I heard him make xenophobic jokes about Muslims, or used rape as a metaphor for what the courts were doing to him, he was far less sympathetic).

By the last day of his trial—when reality finally appeared to take hold—there was little but pity. Before closing arguments, Morton sat outside the courtroom, rocking gently, a sad Humpty Dumpty.

“Sit down,” he invited me, without preamble. “It’s so hard,” he said, looking at the ceiling. “Especially when all I set down to do is help people.” He seemed short of breath. “It all boils down to intentions, doesn’t it? We were following the letter of the law. We studied and studied. But they’re spending ten million dollars on this case. They want to give us jail time in amounts like Nazi war criminals or Jeffrey Dahmer.” When he was in the monastery in Nepal for eight months, he took a sacred vow to work for the enlightenment of all beings, he said. And now his rights were being violated because of his choice to shun corrupt systems.

“This is all about freedom,” he claimed. “We’re fighting the IRS and their mangled bastard child, the banks. People voted for Trump because they wanted to tear down the IRS.”

Jury deliberations took just two hours. Upon hearing the guilty verdict, Melissa reportedly collapsed to the floor and had to be revived by paramedics.

The judge set a sentencing date for Sean in June 2017, but he failed to show up. He filed a nonsense motion that same morning, directing that his case be moved to the Supreme Court. He also missed the taping of Strange Universe, his radio show, calling his cohosts from what sounded like a car on the highway.

“I’m fine,” he said, not quite convincingly. “I’m out and about here somewhere. It’s okay as far as everything goes.” He insisted that the case was indeed “with the Supreme Court” now.

In the days that followed, while still a fugitive, Morton created a GoFundMe fund-raiser titled “Future for Melissa,” asking for money to help her move. Where she planned to go, it wasn’t clear, given that she was facing her own sentencing date. (“I think she’ll get all the assistance she needs relocating to a bunk bed at FCI Dublin,” one Twitter follower said dryly.) The GoFundMe soon disappeared.

For her part, Melissa signed a presentencing agreement committing to avoid contact with Sean. “Does anyone know how to sell a whole lot of comic books that isn’t too time consuming?” she posted on social media one day. Another time she posted, “I’m not afraid to admit when I make mistakes—like the one time I got married!” But love isn’t the most rational of forces, and in August the Mortons were arrested together, at a hotel in Desert Hot Springs, California. According to the government, they’d checked in to watch the solar eclipse.

At their sentencing, Morton tried to change his plea to declare himself a Fourteenth Amendment citizen. Judge Wilson denied every one of his proposed motions, saying only, “Too late, Mr. Morton.” He was sentenced to seventy-two months in prison and five years’ probation and ordered to reimburse the $480,000 owed to the IRS, as well as a fine of $2,900, to be paid in quarterly increments of $25 from prison. He was also barred from working in any business related to debt relief.

At Melissa’s sentencing, according to the website UFO Watchdog, she entered the courtroom in a wheelchair and read an emotional letter of apology: she was taking responsibility for her actions, the experience had “kicked her in the behind” and “set her on the right path.” She added, “This would have never happened had I not met Mr. Morton.” Judge Wilson believed she had come under “some kind of Svengali-type influence” from her husband: she was sentenced to twenty-four months in prison and five years of probation, and fined $2,800.

The government was eager to set an example for other would-be redemption theorists. To Melissa’s sentencing memorandum, the prosecution added that the case presented a powerful need and opportunity for the court “to deter similar ‘sovereign citizen’ fraudsters,” as they put it. “Members of the tax-defier movement will take note of whatever sentences the Court imposes upon defendant in this case.”

But the sentence served only to strengthen Morton’s inherent belief that the American financial system is a stacked deck, impenetrable, unfair, a Minotaur’s lair built to ensnare people who enter into it without the proper weapons.

“The courts and the bar association are all protecting the banks,” he had said, months before his disastrous day in court. “Redemption should work, does work, legally works.” He looked troubled, as though he were getting a psychic twinge of what was to come. “But they just refuse to do any of it.”

The Jew banker–world control paranoia was echoed by Donald Trump during his presidential campaign, when he attacked what he called “the Clinton Machine” for meeting secretly with moneyed donors. “We’ve seen this firsthand in the WikiLeaks documents,” he thundered in one characteristic speech. “In which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special-interest friends, and her donors.” At one point, Trump released a meme on Twitter that showed Clinton smirking against a backdrop of stacks of cash. Next to her was a red six-pointed star, which read “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” He later insisted it was meant to be a “sheriff’s star,” not a Star of David.

Not coincidentally, the 2016 election saw the meteoric rise of the so-called alt-right, a group that will cop to being nationalists but has different reactions to being called racist, ranging from indignant denial to shrugging acceptance (the Proud Boys, for instance, are a nationalist men’s group who rather dubiously insist they have no racist overtones—and threaten to sue news outlets who report otherwise—but will cheerfully acknowledge being Islamophobic). The best-known US figure is Richard Spencer, who is an open racist interested in forming a white ethno-state. (Spencer’s views on Jewish people are somewhat veiled: he’s been explicit that he considers Jews a race unto themselves, and has tweeted dismissively about the “Holocaust industry” after Trump cut millions from the budget for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.)

Spencer was made famous by an ocean of not-mean-enough profiles by mainstream media outlets, many of them marveling that he had a discernible chin, a passable haircut, and owned a suit. He popularized the term “alternative right” in 2011 when he first took over the National Policy Institute, a dusty academic racist organization that he managed to turn into his personal vehicle for stardom. Seeking political power and public acceptability, Spencer’s goal was to keep a careful distance from unabashed racists like those who gathered in Kentucky (though he did, at various times, have a respectful working relationship with Heimbach).

To that end he effectively built relationships with alt-right types across Europe, working toward a global movement. Spencer created a company, Altright Corporation, with the leaders of Arktos Media, a Swedish bookseller, which claims to be the leading (and probably only) publisher of the alt-right, as well as with a European white supremacist YouTube channel called Red Ice. The goal of the new partnership, Spencer told Buzzfeed News when it was first announced, was to extend connections with his fellow European ideologues to help “displace the conservative movement.”

Patrik Hermansson, an activist from Sweden in the group Hope Not Hate, infiltrated the alt-right movement both in the United States and abroad and spent several months among its leaders. Given their glorification of Norse culture, he was welcomed with open arms. What he discovered was a world that looked remarkably like standard-issue neo-Nazism, one of “extreme racism, antisemitism, Holocaust denial, esoteric Nazi rituals, and wild conspiracy theories … a movement that sometimes glorifies Nazi Germany, openly supports genocidal ideas and is unrelentingly racist, sexist, and homophobic.”

That evening in the field in Kentucky the unapologetic, ungenteel variant of hatred was blasted at top volume by Art Jones, the elderly anti-Semite from Illinois with a surprisingly strong set of lungs. “Now President Trump, he has surrounded himself with hordes of Jews,” he yelled, not entirely accurately. “Including a Jew in his own family!” His audience, seated at long wooden tables under a white tent, muttered in disgusted agreement, save for two little girls who were coloring obliviously. “I’m sorry I voted for the son of a bitch,” he shouted some more. A woman bounced a fretful baby; a squat little man in a tan shirt and a swastika armband poked around behind Jones at the lectern, looking for another beer.

Ostensibly, poor whites from Kentucky were the reason the racists had trekked out to Pikeville. But the actual townspeople of Pikeville weren’t present at the gathering. A local man donated his land for the white nationalists to use—his sympathies were unclear—but almost every one of the attendees was from out of state.

The forces of whiteness were a varied bunch: some of them were young racists and some were slightly older. The National Socialist Movement was there, a neo-Nazi party whose leader, “Commander” Jeff Schoep, lives in Detroit. (The NSM’s use of military titles is part of a pretension to military rigor that’s common among white supremacist groups.) The Global Crusaders: Order of the Ku Klux Klan were there, an arm of the KKK that seemed especially young: most of them were from Alabama, skinny, acne-pocked, chicken-necked. A few representatives from the Original Knight Riders Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were beside them, older guys in paramilitary black; one went by the name Sky Soldier and bore an unsettling resemblance to Willie Nelson. He shyly handed me his card when I asked for an interview. SOLDIERS OF GOD, it read, MILITANT CHRISTIANS SINCE 1118 A.D.

Vanguard America was there, too, a younger, hipster-looking white nationalist group that seemed to make everyone else a bit uncomfortable, although its members’ sentiments were indistinguishable from the party line: a separate country for whites, Muslims out, beware the Jew. (“Know your enemy,” one of their flyers read, over a sagging, eyeless visage of George Soros wearing a red Star of David on his lapel. “He knows you.)”

And Brian “Sonny” Thomas was there, a white nationalist from Ohio with a graying mullet and a love for classic rock. He made headlines in 2010 for tweeting about wanting to shoot Latinos (“Illegals everywhere today! So many spicks makes me feel like a speck. Grr. Where’s my gun?”), despite having had a child with a Latina woman. He ran an online radio show and periodically popped up in the local news for doing things like unfurling Confederate flags during school board meetings; a state politician got in trouble not long before the conference for appearing on his show to promote a ban on sanctuary cities.

I wandered over to Thomas to chat. “Are you gonna be fair?” he demanded.

“I hope so,” I replied. He grinned and genially lapsed into a long near-monologue on a variety of subjects: Donald Trump (“He’s totally surrounded by cucks and Jews,” he says, using the derisive supremacist term for a conservative sellout or a weakling of any kind); the president’s recent bombing of Syria (an outrage, we agreed, for different reasons); Venezuela; states’ rights; fathers’ rights; the gold standard; Charleston mass shooter Dylann Roof (a false-flag attack, Thomas thought, or maybe simply a victim of MKUltra or similar mind control). He was also concerned about child molestation: “Deep within the upper echelons of power, there’s a lot of pedophilia,” Thomas explained. “It’s arrogance. These people think they can’t be touched.” Pizzagate had made inroads here, too, although nobody used that name for it.

Thomas blamed most of the world’s problems on the globalists, people like CNN founder Ted Turner and Bill Gates, but placed America’s moral decline firmly at the feet of the Jews: “The whole media is owned by six companies, which are all owned by Jews.” But he could feel a new and encouraging shift, he added: “I can talk to people like you at a gas pump and we’re not talking in hushed tones, you know? Communication is the first step.”

“I’m Jewish,” I told him. His face registered several different shades of polite surprise.

“That’s fine!” he said at last, reassuringly. “You might think I’m full of shit. And that’s fine.”

Art Jones, the yelling elderly anti-Semite, hailed from the Chicago suburbs and was the head of the America First Committee, a group of which he seemed to be the sole member. He’d been generating headlines since the 1970s for making outrageously bigoted statements, like calling the Holocaust “a big international extortion plot that was greatly exaggerated.” He also ran repeatedly, unsuccessfully, for Congress. His wife came along, too, wordless and frail-looking, wearing a tragic wig and blocky glasses. An old Chicago Reader profile of Jones from 1994 includes a revealing, heartbreaking anecdote: Jones’s father, a World War II veteran, was outraged to see American neo-Nazis goose-stepping down the street. He ran out from the pub where he was drinking, fists up, ready to kick the ass of the man leading the Nazis. When he saw that it was his own son, he collapsed in tears and walked away.

There were only a few women present, and four or five children. Otherwise, the crowd was male. As I was pondering that, I noticed Mike Enoch wandering among them, a white supremacist cohost for a show called The Daily Shoah on a site he ran called The Right Stuff. Back in January, Enoch temporarily vanished in disgrace when it was revealed by anti-fascists who doxxed him (published his real name and other personal information) that his wife had Jewish heritage. Enoch’s cohosts said he was temporarily unavailable to host the show because he was in the process of separating from her.

Meanwhile, Heimbach and a few TWP helpers were focused on corralling a small group of reporters, whom the crowd was eyeing warily.

“Can the Lugenpresse please come forward?” Heimbach boomed cheerfully, using the Nazi term for the lying press. We walked over as the crowd giggled.

“No media past the Porta-Potties this way,” he said, gesturing. “That’s for everyone who wants privacy.”

“I’m in a fuckin’ union job,” one guy cracked. He was wearing a T-shirt that read MY BOSS IS AN AUSTRIAN PAINTER. “I don’t give a shit.” The white supremacists chortled. This friendly, convivial evening was unusual. For a very long time, white supremacist groups were riven by disagreements and factionalism and infighting. “There was bad blood,” Thomas explained. “Things were said. Girlfriends were stolen.” It was more than that: a lot of racist groups in the United States fall apart almost as quickly as they are formed, either because their members murder one another or because they end up in prison. But in the age of Trump, racists were hoping to usher in a new era of cooperation and an advancement for the white, Jew-less, Muslim-less, Latino-less country of which they all dreamed.

“It’s not about the uniform you wear or the colors you fly,” “Commander” Schoep of the NSM told the audience. He was wearing a pinstripe suit, for some reason, which looked out of place in the context of his being in a grassy field with men in pseudomilitary outfits. “It’s about the color of our skin. Our enemies have thrived on our infighting, but nationalism is rising in the United States.”

Still, the turnout was a little disappointing: in the end, this mass meeting of the champions of whiteness amounted to about one hundred people, quietly eating fried chicken and biscuits out of Styrofoam containers as speaker after speaker droned on at a rickety podium. As the speakers wound down, they turned to their anxieties about the following afternoon, when a rally was planned in downtown Pikeville. They expected anti-fascist counterprotesters to show up, and both sides had been talking a big game online: after recent violent clashes at Auburn University and UC Berkeley, they thought that Pikeville might be the next explosive battleground. “If I see anybody running or breaking ranks, you better hope the Reds catch you,” Schoep told the crowd. “You better hope the antifa catch you.”

They needed to make a good impression on the townspeople, too, “Major” Mike Schloar of the NSM sternly reminded everyone. “I told people at a rally in Harrisburg last month, ‘Don’t use foul language or racial slurs,’” he commanded the audience, irate. “Apparently people had their ears closed. We’re going to be in front of a lot of media. Keep it clean. Don’t use any foul language: spic, spook, kike, gook—do I have to go through a whole list?” The crowd tittered. “If you say something at some hoodrat ghetto thug, they’ll think you’re no better.”

The big question is always whether racist ideas are spreading. How much damage can they do? How does the rank contagion of their prejudice affect the rest of us? The contagion certainly isn’t spreading very far or fast: in an August 2017 poll by ABC News and the Washington Post, just 9 percent of those surveyed said it was “acceptable” to hold neo-Nazi or white supremacist views. Ten percent said they supported the alt-right movement, while 50 percent said they opposed it (the remaining 40 percent had no opinion, indicating they weren’t familiar with the meaning of the terms).

There was wide division of opinion about whether the alt-right held white supremacist views: one 40-percent segment of those surveyed said it did, while another 40-percent segment said it did not. A more recent study by a University of Alabama researcher found that though people might not use the term “alt-right,” plenty of white Americans are willing to say they agree with those beliefs. “Roughly 5.64 percent of America’s 198 million non-Hispanic whites have beliefs consistent with the alt-right’s worldview,” the author George Hawley wrote, or about eleven million Americans.

Whatever the figure, barely veiled racist ideas drew closer to the mainstream after 2016 than they had been for a while or should ever be. Trump, after all, ran on a platform of xenophobic populism that proved attractive to a lot of people: he continued to use the slogan “America First” long after groups like the Anti-Defamation League pointed out its controversial (and conspiratorial) history. The original America First Committee opposed the United States’ entering World War II for reasons both isolationist and anti-Semitic. In 1941, Charles Lindbergh, a spokesperson for the group, blamed American Jewish leaders for rushing the country into conflict: “I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people,” he said. “Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.”

Moreover, much of the TWP’s specific rhetoric on immigration—its fretting about “mass migration” from non-white countries—is about two steps away from actual policy of the Republican Party and the White House. Trump launched his presidential campaign with an infamous speech about Mexican “rapists” and “criminals” crossing the border. Former Breitbart chairman and White House advisor Steve Bannon made the ills of legal immigration and accepting refugees a cornerstone of his politics, and racist rhetoric existed on Breitbart for years, tagging some stories as “Black Crime.” The alt-right figure Jason Reza Jorjani claimed to have had “connections” with the Trump White House, although these ended when Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon were ousted, he said.

No small number of marginal anti-immigrant groups have also made their way into the mainstream. The far-right Federation for American Immigration Reform was, in the early 1980s, a fringe organization, fear-mongering about immigrants sneaking across the border, filling the country with garbage, and stealing jobs. Today, FAIR and such related groups as the Center for Immigration Studies have wide support in the Republican Party. All of them advocate for a drastic reduction in legal immigration, and, not that far under the surface, there is the implication that nonwhite immigrants mean to do us harm. The Trump administration listened, dedicating itself to mass deportations, tightened immigration rules, and a brutal new chapter of increased power for Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Trump himself also frequently used crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, particularly murders, as talking points in his stump speeches and on Twitter.

FAIR’s specific allies inside the White House presumably included advisors Kellyanne Conway, who publicly defended policies such as separating migrant children from their parents, and immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller; Conway also did polling for years on behalf of the anti-Muslim Center for Security Policy, a group led by Frank Gaffney, who claimed that Obama was a secret Muslim and that the government was overrun by secret members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Gaffney, whose center distributed pamphlets urging people to oppose mosques opening in their communities, was praised by Bannon as “one of the senior thought leaders and men of action in this whole war against Islamic radical jihad.” He was even reportedly brought on at one point to advise the Trump campaign.

Another former White House defense advisor, Sebastian Gorka, also had a reported history of associating with far-right and anti-Semitic groups in Hungary, where he spent much of his adult life. He denied being anti-Semitic, but Gorka and his wife, Katharine, built their careers as self-identified experts in radical Islamic terrorism and what he calls “global jihadism.” In NPR interviews Gorka declined to say whether the Trump administration considers Islam a religion, and counterterrorism experts told the Washington Post that his ideas about Islam and terror are “dangerously oversimplified.” The Council on American-Islamic Relations has a simpler descriptor for the Gorkas: “Islamophobes.” After Gorka left the White House, he landed as a bloviator on Fox News.

Beyond the Trump White House, 2017 and 2018 also saw an uptick in the number of white supremacists running for office. Paul Nehlen, an unapologetic anti-Semite with a maliciously, gleefully provocative Internet presence—he was eventually banned from Twitter—ran to replace House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin. James Allsup, a twenty-two-year-old affiliated with the hate group Identity Evropa, won a Republican precinct committee officer position in Washington State. A man named Steve Smith, associated with the Pennsylvania skinhead group Keystone United, had won a similar position there in 2012 and was reelected in 2016. Corey Stewart, a candidate whose main issue involved preserving the Confederate flag, won the Republican primary in a Virginia district, even after being pictured in a grinning buddy clinch with Jason Kessler, an infamous “pro-white” blogger who went on to organize the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. And Art Jones, the Pikeville speaker, became a semi-successful candidate by winning his Republican primary race in Illinois after no one else bothered to run, given that the district was heavily Democratic. “I snookered them,” he exulted to Politico. “I played by the rules, what can I say?”

Matthew Heimbach was cheered, certainly, by the rise of Trumpism, by the more open discussion of white supremacist ideas in the public square, by various kinds of fellow travelers making their way into electoral races. But his vision for America was one that would preferably see it fracturing into little pieces. A realist of sorts, he liked the idea of forming separate nation states within the United States, even, he assured me, leaving space for the deluded souls who still believe in diversity.

“My hope is that we can agree that this was cute and a nice experiment but it didn’t work,” he said, referring to the republic of fifty states united as one. “If there are areas that want to be multicultural, they can do that. We just kind of want to opt out. If there are other people who want to be more progressive and multicultural, you should be able to do that. And if Idaho, Kentucky, and Tennessee want to opt out and be a white ethno-state, they should be allowed to do that. If the black belt in Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia wants to be self-determined like the Black Panthers, I don’t see why they shouldn’t, or Chicanos in the American Southwest.” In the end, he said, “I don’t want to force anyone to live in a way they don’t want to. I don’t want anyone to force me to live in a way I don’t want to.”

Heimbach also outlined what sounded like a reasonable set of immediate policy proposals, designed, it seemed to me, to appeal to a liberal reporter’s sympathies. The events in eastern Kentucky were planned there “because it’s a place where the war on poverty was launched. Democrats and Republicans alike have abandoned it. In the last ten years dental care for children has actually gotten worse after a slight improvement,” he said. “Some of these problems that have been worked on for decades are compounding each other: income inequality, long-term wage stagnation, the opioid epidemic. There’s a lot of problems.”

Heimbach also pointed to a host of environmental issues that have devastated Appalachia, like mountaintop removal mining. Especially when he spoke to reporters, he often talked about the dangers of climate change. “Donald Trump has abandoned the people when it comes to clean air and water,” he told me. “We’re coming to an area that doesn’t have any advocates and hasn’t historically. We want to be able to step in as a third-party alternative.” The sole goal of Heimbach’s proposed Nationalist Front, he concluded, was to act as a voice for the forgotten white American. “Our mission for the Nationalist Front is to have groups come together to advocate for our people.”

“Your politics must be … confusing for a lot of people,” I said, searching for the precise term.

“Whiteness is part of our policy,” he replied. “Advocating for white people. But I also really want to be able to have jobs and justice and smash capitalism and Wall Street. People usually don’t see those things intersect. Our big mission in bringing those pro-white groups together is being an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist force.”

Heimbach was good at staying on-message and being blandly pleasant a lot of the time—and he was very good at not talking about the World Jewry part when speaking to journalists, focusing instead on the kinds of story lines that proved so irresistible through the 2016 election cycle: angry white voters and how they got that way. But on the Daily Stormer, Heimbach took a different tone. “We are winning this war,” he wrote in a guest post.

Around America and the entire European world, we see that nationalism is on the rise, and young men are taking to the streets to fight for their people. No longer will the Jewish minions and their lying media hacks be allowed to dominate the public sphere; our time is now. There is no option to sit on the sidelines any longer, we must push forward in order to secure the future we so desperately desire for our families.

The final sentence is a clear echo of the white supremacist slogan coined by a man named David Lane, the so-called fourteen words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” (Lane had spearheaded the Order and died in prison, sentenced to one hundred ninety years for his involvement in the murder of Alan Berg.)

Heimbach added to his post, referring to the gathering in Kentucky:

With all of the fun and festivities it is also important to remember what we are up against. Dr. Joseph Goebbels once wrote “If someone is attacked by the Jews, that is a sure sign of his virtue. He who is not persecuted by the Jews, or who is praised by them, is useless and dangerous.” In the American context, the Jews like to hide behind their various minions whenever possible: the degenerate left and their “cuckservative” controlled opposition.

The System is agitating all of its forces against us, and when the forces of Organized Jewry are set on the warpath, it means that you are onto something.

Heimbach has occasionally lost his hold on his reasonable affability at public events, too. At a 2016 Trump rally, he reportedly shoved a black woman protester and was charged with misdemeanor harassment. The woman, Kashiya Nwanguma, sued him in civil court. In a characteristically interesting twist, Heimbach argued in court filings that Trump himself encouraged him to shove protesters when the candidate shouted, from the stage, “Get ’em out of here.” In his response to the lawsuit, Heimbach wrote that he “acted pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J Trump” and that “any liability must be shifted to one or both of them.”

“In many ways, and some people disagree with me on this, Heimbach is David Duke 2.0,” Ryan Lenz said, referring to the infamous white supremacist and former member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, who was, for a while, making inroads into American public life to a surprising and unsettling degree. Lenz, a senior investigative reporter at the Southern Poverty Law Center, had been talking to Heimbach for years in a sort of curious not-friendship where, as Lenz put it dryly, “he always picks up the phone when I call, for some reason.”

Heimbach “knows how to package the ideas in a way that he feels will lead to real political power in this current era,” Lenz said. “He’s smarter than Schoep and much more of a politician.” He knows “what faces to put on to make the audience that he’s talking to happy with what he says. I sometimes call him the consummate glad-hander of the radical right.”

Heimbach also took advantage of the broader cultural conversations that have occurred about why people voted a racist into office and the public resurgence of white supremacists. The temptation of journalists and pundits has been to blame white supremacist conspiracy thinking on a loss of economic status: people have lost so much and they need someone to blame. Certainly that explanation—that Trump tapped into economic anxiety and frustration—was offered to explain his popularity among conservative voters.

But Chip Berlet, a left-leaning researcher who focuses on right-wing extremism and conspiracy thinking, found that to be an overly simplistic, ahistorical framework to explain how hatred takes root. “How come the KKK grew in the boom cycle in the twenties?” he asked in a phone interview. “As many as five million or more joined. If you go back and you read the newspapers being put out by the Klan, that newspaper was obsessed with the Jews taking over America and destroying the country. It wasn’t economic. Most people were doing well. It was the fear of falling, as Barbara Ehrenreich puts it. The middle class is always afraid of falling down the economic, social or cultural ladder.” Or, perhaps, the fear of losing one’s place on a narrow ledge to someone seen as inferior.

The dinner in Kentucky ended quietly, with the white supremacists trooping back to their cars at around 10 p.m. (or, in a few cases, weaving unsteadily, reeking of beer). A campfire was dying down; the owner of the property, a paunchy local guy who looked to be in his midfifties, stood mournfully by the fire, playing a trumpet, staring into the embers.

The following morning, the antifa forces beat the white supremacists, by several hours, to downtown Pikeville; they were mostly young, with many more women, and seemed woefully unprepared to deal with angry racists with guns. Nonetheless, they traded jeers with the League of the South, a neo-Confederate secessionist group. The League hadn’t been at the previous night’s party, but they were out that day, standing alone in a large barricaded-in area in front of Pikeville’s courthouse, in the area designated for protesters.

The counterprotesters stood behind barricades on the other side of the street. State and local police were placed in between, looking grim.

“Why don’t you have any women with you?” one counterprotester yelled.

“Our women are mothers!” a League of the South guy yelled back, indignant. “They have no business with us here today!” That prompted a chorus of laughter, boos, and something I didn’t catch from a woman on the antifa side.

“We can’t understand you because we don’t speak nigger!” a League member shot back, although the woman he was screaming at was white. I heard a chorus of gasps. A moment later, a backup group of antifa arrived, seventy or so, carrying a banner that read ANTIFASCISTS WORLDWIDE UNITED. A couple were banging drums or hooting into vuvuzelas.

“Every nation, every race! Punch a Nazi in the face!” they chanted. “From the Midwest to the South, punch a Nazi in the mouth!”

Michael Hill was watching all of this in disgust. He founded the League of the South back in 1994, after, ironically, working for decades as a history professor at Stillman College, a historically black university in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. (Hill resigned in 1998; in subsequent years, according to the SPLC, he’s done things like send the names of some of his former students to a racist email list as a bit of comic relief.)

Hill, too, was worried about the Jews. “We’re always concerned about people with dual citizenship,” he said amiably. “And most American Jews have dual citizenship. A lot of problems, from the Southern perspective, come from the Jews. The Jew has been no friend to the South. They’re behind every left-wing organization that wants to take down our monuments, you know. Where we can oppose them, we will.”

He stopped to curl his lip at the counterprotesters. “Look at that crowd,” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “Cheering on their own destruction.”

It was hours before Heimbach and the rest of the white brigade arrived (according to the Guardian, one leader blamed their lateness on car trouble). They took up their place in the designated area to lots of booing from the other side of the barricades.

Then, despite all their posturing, for the next several hours everyone just stayed put: the police, the protesters on their respective sides, and a gaggle of local folks, looking on in dismay.

“These people aren’t from here,” a man in a Johnny Cash T-shirt complained. (He declined to tell me his name: “I work for the government. I’m not giving you my name.”) “Neither side. They’ve singled us out for some unknown reason. This is pathetic. This entire fiasco. Please don’t portray the locals like we’re part of this. None of us were involved.”

He looked back and forth between the two sides, getting heated. “Do they even realize there are black coal miners?” he asked, shaking his head. He pointed out that Pikeville—a university town—also has a hospital with an excellent medical school. “We have a large Islamic population here now. I owe my life to a doctor from Palestine.

“I’m not naive,” he said, before walking away. He knew that Pikeville has its racists. “But we’re not all dumb hillbillies.”

They might have all stayed put, but they didn’t keep quiet. “You’re on the side of the Jews who own the banks!” a League of the South protester yelled energetically across the street. The NSM guys chimed in, leading a rousing chant of “Race traitor cucks! Race traitor cucks!”

“Shut the fuck up!” the antifa side of the street chanted back cheerfully.

I walked around the back of the white supremacist pen to chat with the current leader of Vanguard America, who was standing guard, holding a very large German military assault rifle. “Commander Dillon,” as he called himself, was a young a former marine (his real name is Dillon Hopper, I later learned, changed from Dillon Irizarry). After a few minutes of pained conversation I managed to elicit that he was from New Mexico.

“Me too!” I said delightedly. I told him that as a child, my family split time between Santa Fe, where I mostly grew up, and a ranch that my dad and uncle ran in southern New Mexico, in a town so small Dillon had never heard of it.

“That’s weird,” he muttered.

We got to talking about the Jews. Like Michael Hill, he was pretty sure we all have dual citizenship, and he’d like us to go “back to Israel” under his preferred form of nation-state.

“What about me?” I asked. “I’m not from Israel. I’m from where you are.”

Dillon looked at me thoughtfully. “Well, it’s complicated,” he said at last.

After hours in the broiling sun listening to antifa yelling and Nazi droning, it was over: a column of state police in riot gear appeared out of nowhere and led the white supremacists out of their pen, back to their cars. The antifa and other counterprotesters followed, still staying safely across the street. An NSM member posed next to his ratty Toyota Corolla for a photographer. A guy in a muscle tank top reading DONALD PUMP and with a ’roided-out image of the president stood in the back of a pickup truck, yelling insults. Some of the youngest neo-Nazis piled into a sagging Honda together and sarcastically waved at me as they pulled away. I smirked at them and waved back, although I wasn’t sure what I meant by doing so.

What is it that I spent the day looking at? From one angle, it all seemed like a shabby, threadbare showing by a bunch of hateful shitheads with no real money or power behind them: sweaty white guys in ridiculous uniforms perspiring under a merciless sun, while the locals they came to save wished they’d all just go away.

But I knew that there are more people like them who didn’t make an appearance. And what worried me, particularly, was the youth of the ones who did show up. I was thinking about the readers of the Daily Stormer, which promoted the rally. Andrew Anglin, the site’s founder, was in his early thirties, Ohio-born, shave-headed, and in photographs, slightly bug-eyed; in 2012 he launched a website called Total Fascism. That one wasn’t very popular, but his audience grew: the Daily Stormer is believed to reach about 220,000 readers in the United States every month, according to Quantcast data.

That’s less than a needle in the haystack of Internet traffic; more of a pinprick on the face of the sun. Nonetheless, it can have a real impact. In the spring of 2017, Anglin was sued by the SPLC for inciting what it called a “troll storm” against a Jewish real estate agent in Montana named Tanya Gersh. Richard Spencer’s mother, Sherry Spencer, accused Gersh of trying to pressure her into selling her property in Montana. And in support, Anglin rallied his readers to send vile threats and harassment to Gersh, her family, and her twelve-year-old son, much of it Holocaust-themed. After the SPLC lawsuit, Anglin’s readers raised about $150,000 dollars for his legal defense fund. Anglin didn’t attend the Kentucky rally in person, though—he seemed to be hiding at the time (rumored to be in Germany or the Philippines or a remote part of Russia, though I personally believe he was in a relative’s basement in Ohio somewhere). But his readers were there, people willing to get off the computer and spill into the street.

Even then, it was hard to envision most of these men ever getting or maintaining real political power, given that some of the leaders were too scared to show up, and given how damp-browed and maladjusted and just plain at a loss they are in dealing with the larger world. They even seemed unnerved by little old me: I stayed at a Holiday Inn in Pikeville alongside a bunch of League of the South guys and a few scattered white supremacist types from the East Coast. To my great delight, they meekly fled the breakfast bar every time I entered the room, a sort of one-woman reverse invasion of Poland.

Still, the rally had some of its intended effect: a show of force, however small, and the media attention that went along with it. Heimbach beamed the whole day, basking in the glow of a dozen television interviews, being chased by a perspiring blond documentarian who had been filming him throughout the weekend in Kentucky. “I’m very happy,” he told a camera.

Sonny Thomas, the mulleted racist from Ohio, came by to chat as the rally wound down. He was wearing a bright-red WHITE PRIDE T-shirt, and he seemed happy, too. “Went pretty good,” he said, and wandered off.

A minute later, he returned. “I know you’re a Jew and all,” he said, not quite looking at me. “But you’re a beautiful woman.” He grabbed my hand and kissed it, then walked away without looking back.

The relative peace at Pikeville turned out to be misleading. A few months later, in the fall of 2017, at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, given the name Unite the Right, the peace imploded. Most of the same groups showed up again: Heimbach and the TWP, Vanguard America, some KKK affiliates. Marching with Vanguard, wearing their polo-and-khakis uniform, was James Alex Fields, Jr., a twenty-year-old from Ohio. A few hours later, in front of a horrified crowd and dozens of cameras, he drove his Dodge Charger directly into marching counterprotesters as they turned up a narrow side street, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer and wounding dozens of others.

Beyond Heyer’s horrific death, the event was marred by countless other acts of white supremacist violence: a black man named DeAndre Harris was beaten nearly to death in a parking garage by a group of white men. (He was arrested on a felony charge of “unlawful wounding” while most of the people who attacked him initially remained free. The man who filed charges against Harris, Harold Ray Crews, described himself as a “Southern Nationalist.”) A man in a bulletproof vest fired a gun at the ground near a group of counterprotesters while shouting racial slurs (after initially pointing the gun directly at one of them, a guy holding a flamethrower). Unlike the police in Pikeville, who kept the two sides apart, the Charlottesville police were quite absent, standing aside until they decided to disperse both sides.

Commander Dillon of Vanguard said he hadn’t been in Charlottesville and denied that Fields was a member of his organization. He claimed Fields had been photographed with them due to “poor leadership and uncoordination” at the event. “This was a major disaster, with a life taken, this is reprehensible behavior that I personally would never tolerate in my ranks,” he wrote to me. Fields had been photographed in their uniform, holding one of their shields because, Dillon said, “Our dress code is public knowledge. A simple white polo shirt and brown slacks is all one would need to blend in. At past events other groups, including ours have worn the same attire to appear larger in number and not isolate ourselves via clothing. I do not know what this man’s intentions were but I can only assume they were nothing more than vile and disturbing.”

In a Vice documentary about Charlottesville, Chris Cantwell, another racist media personality who’d also been in Kentucky, unpacked a small arsenal onto his hotel bed.

“We’re not nonviolent,” he assured reporter Elle Reeve. “We’ll fucking kill these people if we have to.”

I realized that my preoccupation with the size of the racist right, the number of supporters, was not exactly relevant. The movement didn’t have to be big. It didn’t have to have mainstream support or the ear of the White House. All it took was one person with immovable beliefs and a willingness to do what his fellow travelers publicly insisted was unacceptable or unthinkable.

Even then, a new and particularly vile conspiracy theory was taking form: alt-right trolls and neo-Nazis, including Anglin himself, claimed that Heather Heyer died from a heart attack, not because she was run down by a car. They implied that she was out of shape and bleeding-heart liberals were trying to pin her death on the Charlottesville marchers to vilify them. A medical examiner’s report released two months later showed clearly that she died from blunt force trauma to the chest.

Not surprisingly, the man who filmed Fields driving his car into the crowd became implicated in another bizarre conspiracy web. Brennan Gilmore, a Virginia native, took part in the counterprotest; he is also a former State Department employee, which struck some people as very suspicious. Gilmore released the footage of the collision because, from his vantage point, he believed it was indisputably intentional, that Fields had rammed the crowd on purpose, careening down an empty street to do so. Gilmore gave several media interviews making that point, and then the predictable happened: Nazis and the online detectives and the online Nazi detectives started trying to figure out who he truly worked for.

“They wrote that I was a CIA operative, funded by (choose your own adventure) George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, the IMF/World Bank, and/or a global Jewish mafia to orchestrate the Charlottesville attack in order to turn the general public against the alt-right,” he wrote in Politico. “I had staged the attack and then worked with MSNBC and other outlets controlled by the left to spread propaganda. They claimed my ultimate goal was to start a race war that would undermine and then overthrow Donald Trump on behalf of the ‘Deep State.’”

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, eleven people sued the Unite the Right organizers, including Heimbach, Spencer, and Jason Kessler. The League of the South was also named as a defendant, as were two KKK groups—the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the East Coast Knights of the Ku Klux Klan—and Vanguard America, putting all of the newly formed Nationalist Front in danger of being sued out of existence. When Kessler tried to hold a follow-up Unite the Right rally a year later, only about two dozen participants showed up, drowned out by thousands and thousands of people who flooded into Washington, DC, to oppose them.

A few months before the flopped Unite the Right 2, the Traditionalist Worker Party fell apart when Matt Parrott, who was also Heimbach’s father-in-law, found out that Heimbach was having an affair with his wife. In the melee that ensued, police said, Heimbach physically assaulted his own wife and Parrott. The Heimbachs divorced, and in September 2018, per the SPLC, Heimbach pleaded guilty to assaulting Parrott. Soon after entering his guilty plea, Heimbach began working as “community outreach director” for the National Socialist Movement.

As these white supremacist movements and their leaders flamed out, collapsing under the weight of sordid affairs and major lawsuits, other groups were gaining steam. A tiny paramilitary neo-Nazi cell called the Atomwaffen Division, first founded in 2015, started to show up more and more frequently in the news. It bore a disturbing similarity to the Order, which had murdered Jewish radio host Alan Berg; its materials called for acts of violence to destroy “the System,” and they were engaged in active weapons training. The group was linked to five murders across the United States, including the knifing death of Blaze Bernstein, a gay Jewish college student stabbed more than twenty times. Atomwaffen were believed to be recruiting through literature they distributed on college campuses.

The number of UFO-related conspiracy theories is dizzying and too numerous for us to explore each one. Aliens have been linked to everything from the JFK assassination to cattle mutilations (extraterrestrials perform bizarre, bloodless surgeries on livestock, generally taking, for some arcane purpose, their eyes, tongues, and anal cavities). The point is that none of these assertions can ever be settled: there is no evidence the government can produce that will satisfy UFO buffs, and UFO researchers have no evidence to prove any of their claims definitively to a skeptical public. The CIA and the FBI have both supplied documents that outline their full involvement in the alien question, they argue. In 2013, the British government declassified files on its own UFO unit, which was shuttered in 2009 (a report recommended that move because the unit “is consuming increasing resources but produces no valuable defence output”).

The CIA concludes its website’s capsule history of the subject on a bit of a resigned note: “Like the JFK assassination conspiracy theories, the UFO issue probably will not go away soon, no matter what the Agency does or says. The belief that we are not alone in the universe is too emotionally appealing and the distrust of our government is too pervasive to make the issue amenable to traditional scientific studies of rational explanation and evidence.”

Richard Dolan, the UFO researcher, is concerned with what he calls falsifiability. Accepting the claims of someone like Goode feels more like religious faith to him, and it makes him nervous. Dolan, who’s also a self-styled historian, laid out his own theories in dozens of articles: that the national security state is concerned about “real objects with extraordinary capabilities,” as he put it in a 2002 piece, and that there’s also evidence that the UFOs, as described by witnesses, do things that human technology isn’t capable of doing. He and other more traditional ufologists try to back up their claims with declassified government memos, eyewitness photos of purported UFOs, interviews with ex-military personnel: much of it more closely echoes traditional scholarship, although the results are eclectic.

“I do think some of these self-described whistleblowers aren’t particularly credible,” Dolan said, rather grimly, standing in a hallway of the hotel in Summerlin and making no particular effort to keep his voice down. “Believing such stories without genuine evidence takes us down a dangerous road within an already treacherous field,” Dolan wrote in a Facebook post in 2017, one “that is constantly in the crosshairs of a skeptical establishment.” His fear of foul play—government infiltration meant to discredit and confuse the UFO disclosure movement—is grounded in the past. “In US history, we’re replete with provocateurs and disinformation coming from US government channels.”

Dolan isn’t being paranoid entirely without reason. He points to Cass Sunstein, who worked in the White House under President Obama. In a 2008 paper, “Conspiracy Theories,” Sunstein and coauthor Adrian Vermeule suggest that “false conspiracy theories” about the government should be countered with “cognitive infiltration”: paid agents who plant correct information among antigovernment and conspiratorial groups. There’s no evidence that the idea was ever executed, but the proposition was enough to make various “truth communities” very nervous.

Dolan’s suspicions echo those of earlier UFO researchers. In his 1991 book Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception, famed UFO researcher and computer scientist Jacques Vallée wrote that he had come to believe many UFO events were hoaxes, engineered sometimes by delusional private citizens and sometimes by government agencies with bigger aims in mind. “This bears emphasizing,” he wrote. “Some UFO sightings are covert experiments in the manipulation of the belief systems of the public. And some cases simply did not happen. The stories about them, numerous rumors of crashed saucers and burned aliens, were not so much the result of delusions as the product of deception: rumors deliberately planted in the eager minds of gullible believers to hide more real facts about which it was felt that the public and the scientific community had no ‘need to know.’”

The idea that some UFO sightings are fabricated to draw people away from the real truth still holds some sway. Lorin Cutts is another UFO researcher I’ve come to know, someone who believes in the existence of alien beings even as he doubts and detests almost every facet of modern UFO theorizing. He takes a complex middle ground on the UFO issue, siding with neither Dolan nor Goode. “Extra-terrestrials almost certainly exist,” he told me in an email exchange. “What they have to do with the phenomenon of UFOs is questionable and largely a cultural and mythological construct—I don’t believe that we can know for certain right now.”

I think any serious student of the UFO subject would do well to put these alleged whistleblowers, secret space program aficionados and the click-bait vultures that promote them to one side. Sure, people will always listen and be entertained by them, but let’s call it what it is—ufotainment. I’m always amused when people hold up one whistleblower as credible, simply because of apparently corroborating stories, whilst the next is deemed laughable. Almost none of them have provided any credible evidence as to what they are supposedly revealing. In that respect they are all even. The fact that two or more stories may apparently corroborate one another is not corroboration of anything. How easy would it be for individuals—or the intelligence community—to fabricate such a set up?

In a way, the suspicions felt by Cutts—an apparently levelheaded person—reveal the profound and continuing legacy of the US government’s tactics of disinformation. COINTELPRO was, after all, a disinformation campaign created by the FBI to disrupt and discredit American activist groups. The fact that UFO researchers—and Pizzagaters, and every other conspiracy community—are so paranoid about plants and saboteurs in their ranks shows just how well that program worked to destabilize many different kinds of dialogue and research.

So what will bring all of this arguing and debating and finger-pointing to an end? UFO researchers call it “disclosure,” the time when the world’s governments will finally reveal everything they know about UFOs, extraterrestrials, and alien technology. It is a day that they yearn for and urgently seek: their talk about it echoes the language of end-times preachers who describe a coming climactic battle, a grand revelation, a final decisive moment when humanity will be divided into the drowned and the saved.

John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, has been a vocal advocate for disclosure. When he served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, he told CNN, he asked the president to disclose “some information about some of these things, and in particular, some information about what was going on at Area 51.” Asked if he believes in aliens, he responded, “There are a lot of planets out there. The American people can handle the truth.”

Podesta promised that if he became Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, he would renew his efforts to declassify government records on Area 51. And even Clinton herself signaled a willingness to entertain disclosure, telling one radio interviewer, “I want to open the files as much as we can.” When she was asked if she believed in UFOs, she responded, “I don’t know. I want to see what the information shows.” But, she added, “There’s enough stories out there that I don’t think everybody is just sitting in their kitchen making them up.” Coming from a careful, centrist politician, Clinton’s position signals just how far alien belief has gained acceptability.

Beyond the campy, Bigfootish novelty of aliens and UFOs, even the most amateur and outlandish researchers pose questions that are important and relevant—about government secrecy and wasteful military spending, and about the real challenges of compelling transparency when it comes to things like defense programs and military innovations.

Sometimes, out of nowhere, we have had stunning and serious proof that the government continued to investigate UFOs and has seen some things it can’t quite explain. In December 2017, the New York Times published a story revealing that from 2007 to 2012 (at least), the Department of Defense carefully buried a secret, $22-million-a-year program in the budget called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. It was devoted to investigating sightings of unidentified aircraft, created at the behest of Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader. A Pentagon spokesperson insisted to the Times that the program ended entirely in 2012, while a former administrator, Luis Elizondo, claimed that it continued in partnership with officials from the navy and the CIA. (Elizondo went on to work for Tom DeLonge, a guitarist with the band Blink-182 who became a UFO activist.)

Together with its story, the Times ran a remarkable video, released by the Defense Department in response to a FOIA request: a 2004 encounter between two navy fighter jets and a whitish object, one that was moving very, very fast. “Look at that thing!” one pilot exclaimed. “It’s rotating.” Intriguingly, the Times report claimed that a Las Vegas warehouse was storing a collection of “metal alloys and other materials” that were said to be recovered from “unidentified aerial phenomena.” As part of the program, the paper added, “Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes.”

The idea that the government was storing alien alloys in a Vegas warehouse was, well, mind-boggling. “Someone explain to me the alien alloys before I fucking explode,” Tom Ley at the sports website Deadspin wrote, speaking for a lot of people. Strangely, though, the Times story didn’t make a big splash in the UFO world, likely because it revealed what UFO researchers would have said they already knew. Instead, there was a sort of quiet satisfaction, a sense that here, at last, disclosure was perhaps upon us. (For Dolan and a few other researchers, there was also skepticism. He specifically charged that the paper has “a history of cooperation with the U.S.-military intelligence community,” which is a reasonable point. He suspected that the government, feeling unable to ignore this particular UFO story any longer, cooperated with the Times as “an exercise in damage control.”)

The Times story did uncover some potential lines of inquiry about questionable government spending. Most of the program’s funding went to just one contractor: Bigelow Airspace, founded by Robert Bigelow, a friend of Reid’s, which was supposedly keeping watch over the alien alloys. And it confirmed that the government was, until very recently, interested in investigating craft sightings, viewing it as an urgent national security priority.

“This is about science and national security,” Reid tweeted in response to the Times story. “If America doesn’t take the lead in answering these questions, others will.”

Goode’s not holding his breath. “True disclosure can only come from the people,” he told his MUFON audience. “If we sit back and wait for someone to walk to a podium and make an announcement, I think we’re just going to keep waiting.” A core part of Goode’s message has always been that disclosure is nearly upon us. He and other UFO researchers have long claimed that shows like Star Trek are part of Hollywood trying to soften us up for the big reveal (Hollywood is, of course, in on the whole thing). “Recently Hollywood has decided we’re ready, because they’ve made us ready,” Goode told his audience six months before the Times story appeared. “But people finding out about crimes against humanity is really going to flip a lot of people out.”

Next to the lecture hall where the talks took place, there was a big room filled with tables and merchandise: DVDs, books, and a set of lumpy handmade alien pendants and figurines. In the next room, a UFO art show with creatively shaped interpretations of planets kept me occupied for far too long.

As I walked among the misshapen ceramic aliens and chatted with the vendors, I felt genuinely glad to be at MUFON after weeks spent in the more stressful company of Nazis and Pizzagaters and Sandy Hook truthers. It occurred to me that UFO lore might represent conspiracy culture at its best: our interest in the hidden, the unknown, the ineffable, the magic of what’s hidden and yet to be revealed. “The UFO mystery holds a mirror to our own fantasies,” Vallée once wrote. “It expresses our secret longings for a wisdom that might come down from the stars in new, improved, easy to-use packaging, to reveal the secrets of life and tell us, at long last, who we are.”

Except that the world of UFO researchers is not quite so innocent or depoliticized since they too believe they’re being watched, surveilled, and deceived by the government. We know that the government does do this to targeted groups, but I was bothered by the suspicions of the UFO enthusiasts as I slowly drifted into hypothermia in that air-conditioned ballroom. I kept thinking rather persistently about Black Lives Matter, a group that has been met with forceful government repression, and about the Native activists at Standing Rock, who were subject to real surveillance and infiltration: recall the firm Energy Transfer Partners, which retained the company TigerSwan to surveil activists with drones and actual spies, who in turn fed their information to local and federal law enforcement.

There is—at the risk of being unkind—something indulgent and self-absorbed about a group of people engaged in a voluntary recreational subculture declaring that they are government targets. COINTELPRO aimed at wrecking the lives, families, and psyches of activists. It takes a profound level of self-importance to claim without evidence that the feds are after you.

Along with self-absorption, MUFON’s leadership has also demonstrated some abhorrent racial politics, right in step with the Trump era. In May 2017, John Ventre, the state MUFON director for Pennsylvania and Delaware, was furious about a Netflix show called Dear White People—about a group of black college students navigating the often racially obtuse world of Ivy League universities—writing on Facebook, “I don’t find this funny. The last thing blacks want is for white males to organize and that’s not too far away!” Ventre went on to fulminate that white males are an “absolute target of the government” with “illegal affirmative action,” as well as a target of the media, since there are interracial couples on television and because white men are “portrayed as incompetent.”

Ventre concluded by inferring that black people are genetically predisposed to violence (“Google serotonin by race”) and also stupid: “Everything in this world was created by Europeans and Americans,” he wrote, incorrectly. “F’ing blacks didn’t even have a calendar, a wheel or a numbering system until the Brits showed up.”

The reaction was widespread outrage by UFO researchers and demands for Ventre’s ouster. But Jan Harzan, the organization’s director, responded defensively, writing in a now-deleted post, “Who is worse, the person posting, or the haters hating? If you need further evidence of this just watch the nightly news where depending on which channel you watch people line up behind one side of an issue, or the other, and then begin yelling at each other.” Harzan also added, “Finally, it is okay to disagree with others, but let’s challenge ourselves to dialogue with that person to first understand their rationale for the opinion they are stating, and then begin a discussion with them on the subject. For only through dialogue and discussion do we advance as a civilization.”

If that was a reference to Ventre’s posts, it sounded like a challenge to consider his opinion that the “f’ing blacks” didn’t have wheels until Europeans showed up to help them out. There’s being insular, and then there’s being toxically out of touch and willing to tolerate absurdly hateful commentary from your leadership.

Two MUFON investigators resigned in the wake of Ventre’s comments; one of them, James Clarkson, called them a last straw in his increasing disaffection with the group and said Harzan’s lack of response made remaining in the organization “morally unacceptable.” Both Clarkson and the other investigator who left, Rich Hoffman, also expressed unease that MUFON had been infiltrated at a high level by what Clarkson called “mysterious people.” They were specifically referring to a Washington State New Age teacher named J. Z. Knight, who has been called a “cult leader” and who claims to channel a supernatural entity named Ramtha, a “35,000-year-old warrior spirit.” Knight is a member of MUFON’s Inner Circle, an advisory board open to anyone who’s donated more than $5,000 to the organization.

In the end, the stakes in any MUFON controversy are questionable. The UFO world is concerned with its own dramas, villains, and celebrities, and these do not often leak out beyond that world, barring genuinely newsworthy developments. UFO researchers pull data points from the wider society when it suits them, and entirely retreat otherwise, and seem largely incapable of doing harm: its adherents do not harass people, and the questions they raise about official secrecy are truly interesting. The call for the government to simply and directly tell everything it knows is of value to us all, and there is something both sad and a little heroic about the UFO-curious as they devotedly await the truth.

Take Gary McKinnon, who, in 2002, got tired of waiting. Someone was going to force the government to come clean, he decided, and that someone would evidently have to be him. A Scottish-born man with Asperger’s syndrome, McKinnon did what seemed reasonable to him at the time: he hacked into army, navy, air force, and NASA computers to rummage through their files. He also left a note on a military website reading, “Your security is crap.” On another, he referred to himself by the name Solo and refered to 9/11 conspiracy theories, writing, “US foreign policy is akin to Government-sponsored terrorism these days.… It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand down on September 11 last year.… I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels.”

At the MUFON conference years later, McKinnon delivered a talk via Skype from his home in London in which he told the crowd dryly, “It was an extreme act, I can see that now.” He believed that the US authorities were covering up critical information not just about alien contact, but about “free energy” and other alien technologies that could make human life immeasurably better. He was vividly aware of what Britons call “fuel poverty,” where thousands of people die each bitter winter because they can’t afford heating fuel. Free energy, he thought, would directly alleviate suffering and save lives.

The government saw it differently, saying McKinnon had deleted critical files, caused $566,000 in damage, and shut down for three days a computer network that served the military in Washington. He was indicted for computer fraud in November 2002.

At first, the government tried carrot over stick, saying that if he voluntarily came to the United States to face charges, he would get “six months community service,” he told the MUFON crowd. “That turned out to be an inaccurate estimate.” McKinnon learned that he was more likely to face seventy years. “I lost my career in IT due to this,” he said. “I got my forklift license and got a job in a local luggage warehouse. Lost that job due to publicity, lost the room I rented, lost my girlfriend of twelve years. I was feeling pretty crappy, to understate it hugely.”

In 2005, McKinnon managed to get a job with the London branch of an American company called—of all things—Electronic Data Systems. He completed one day at work, then returned home to find what he calls “three gigantic men” who identified themselves as the Scotland Yard extradition squad. McKinnon told the British journalist Jon Ronson that the charges terrified him due to the brutality of American jails, where he feared he would be raped.

The British courts granted an order for McKinnon’s extradition in July 2006, but he and his family fought it. In 2008, his lawyers announced that he’d been medically assessed and formally diagnosed with Asperger’s. “Nobody likes being diagnosed of any kind of syndrome, but it did explain a lot,” he said to the MUFON audience. “It’s a medical condition. People tend to have a hyper-inflated sense of truth and justice.”

In 2012, after an exhausting game of extradition tennis, then–home secretary Theresa May announced that the extradition request would be blocked. “Mr. McKinnon is accused of serious crimes,” she told the House of Commons. “But there is also no doubt that he is seriously ill.… He has Asperger’s syndrome, and suffers from depressive illness. Mr. McKinnon’s extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life that a decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr. McKinnon’s human rights.” The Obama administration was “disappointed” with the decision but would respect it. McKinnon would still be arrested and brought to trial if he ever stepped foot in the U.S.

Years later, peering through a webcam into a country he can never visit, McKinnon knew how it all sounded. “To many people it seemed like a mad idea, but to me it seemed like a noble cause,” he said. “It was very easy—I wish it hadn’t been so easy.”

In the end, McKinnon was still frustrated that it was even necessary, in his eyes, to do what he did. “Secrets are never good in any relationship,” he told the MUFON crowd, and I caught myself nodding. “But secrets kept from both the people and the state by forces unknown are the worst kind of secrets.”

Jay Sekulow, a member of Trump’s personal legal team, used the words “shadow government” outright in an appearance on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox. “You’ve got a shadow government that is leaking … information” about Trump, he said, and it includes “people that were in step with the previous administration.” Sekulow also speculated about whether Clinton was “leading the shadow government while Obama’s giving $400,000 speeches,” or if Obama was leading it directly.

“If there was ever confirmation that the Deep State is real, illegal & endangers national security, it’s this,” Donald Trump, Jr., tweeted about yet another White House leak. “Their interests above all else.” Western Pennsylvania congressman Mike Kelly claimed that Obama continued living in Washington, DC, with his family for “one purpose and one purpose only.” He planned “to run a shadow government that is going to totally upset the new agenda.” In a later qualification, Kelly’s spokesperson walked back the comment, saying that Kelly “was sharing the frustration of everyone in the room over how they believe certain Obama administration holdovers within the federal bureaucracy are attempting to upset President Trump’s agenda.”

“Holdovers” is in itself a revealing term, used by people who don’t want to say “shadow government” outright. Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski added the word in a tweet in which he proclaimed “The deep state is real.” All “Obama hold overs in the Gov’t need to go to allow @realDonaldTrump to Make America Great Again!” The holdovers were frequently blamed for leaking or fabricating anything unflattering about the Trump administration. (Sometimes—for example, in the president’s volleys of outraged early morning tweets—a piece of news is denounced as both leaked and fabricated, which is a neat semiotic trick.)

In one thing, however, the people fretting about leaks were correct. There were an unprecedented number of them in the first years of the Trump administration, particularly in the West Wing, where it sometimes seemed as though everyone was secretly recording each other. They were astounding in their breadth (fired White House aide Omarosa Manigault released numerous recordings she’d made, including one of Chief of Staff John Kelly firing her) and their pettiness. When First Lady Melania Trump had kidney surgery, her staff didn’t inform West Wing personnel about when she’d return to work, for fear that would leak, too. In the West Wing, the leaks were part of constant backstabbing and palace intrigue, which seemed endemic to working for the Trump administration. But elsewhere, at the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, they seemed to occur out of a sense of defiance: when EPA staffers were ordered in the fall of 2017 to take a mandatory course on preventing leaks, news of that leaked, as well.

Actual opposition forces within the government allowed the Deep State conspiracy theory to flourish, buoyed by inarguably real events. Similarly, a raft of Twitter accounts dispensing “rogue” tweets spurred paranoia over leakage as evidence of malicious moles inside the government. The tweets were presented as uncensored reports from staffers within various federal agencies, including the EPA and the National Park Service. It is possible that some of the accounts, at least in the administration’s early days, really were manned by dissatisfied employees at agencies that would likely undergo profound changes under the new regime. But soon enough, some of the accounts looked more like liberal fan fiction. One appeared calling itself “Rogue POTUS Staffer.”

“The unofficial resistance team inside the White House,” the account’s bio read at one point. “We pull back the curtain to expose the real workings inside this disastrous, frightening Administration.” Rogue POTUS Staffer managed to garner thousands of credulous retweets by writing, essentially, what liberals wished to hear. Most of the dispatches featured Trump panicking or melting down in absurd ways.

“POTUS suddenly angry watching Ryan press conference,” one tweet read. “Apparently shouted ‘—off’ and threw book at a TV which may be broken now.” In another, “Reportedly, POTUS just became so angry he tried to tip over his desk. Tried three times before giving up. Now, angry and embarrassed.”

Tellingly, this insider account never managed to predict any of the numerous administration departures or produce any information that convincingly showed the missives were coming from inside the White House. Still, the tweets generated a satisfying, narcotizing stream of likes and retweets by delivering constant, impassioned indictments against the administration and dark warnings about where it was headed.

Small enough to fit in a soda can or large enough to encompass a violent plot against America, in the hands of Trump partisans, the Deep State functioned like Silly Putty, stretching in all directions to cover anything that might need explaining away. It might be the Russian collusion investigation or Hillary Clinton not being jailed over her private email servers. (“Why aren’t our deep state authorities looking at this?” Trump groused on Twitter in November 2017, referring to Clinton’s emails, more than a year after the FBI elected to not charge her. “Rigged & corrupt?”)

At the farcical end of the spectrum, Deep Statism was deployed as exculpation in the legal scrapes of a bunch of low-level political actors. In Montana, for example, a Republican candidate for Senate named Troy Downing blasted the Deep State for its “witch hunt” against him—specifically the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, which looked into suspected violations of his hunting license. Then there was Trump advisor Roger Stone, who told Alex Jones in an interview that the Deep State had sent some villains to T-bone his car in a hit-and-run. “They have poisoned me, they have smeared me, and someone in a car tried to kill me,” Stone said, appearing via satellite unharmed and quite chipper after the alleged incident. (According to the Washington Post, Stone claimed to have been a passenger in the car, but he left the scene by the time the police arrived to take a report.) Stone had previously complained in late 2016 that someone had poisoned him with polonium, the deadly radioactive material that was used to kill a Russian spy a decade earlier. Then, too, he appeared to recover in miraculous fashion.

In its more serious guise, Deep Statism represented an alarming new development: a ruling party and a presidential administration that claimed to be under attack even as they held the bulk of power in the United States, that used the language of victimhood even as they were the victors, the history-makers. That is a worrisome phenomenon: claiming that an external enemy threatens the sovereignty of the state—an enemy to be repelled by any means necessary—is historically a hallmark of authoritarian leaders.

Demonstrating the extent to which besieged thinking seeped into the Trump administration was a memo sent out by a staffer at the National Security Council, Rich Higgins, which was so alarming that it became minor national news. Working in the NSC’s strategic planning office, Higgins was one of a group hired by quickly ousted and criminally charged National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. (Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian government officials before Trump had been inaugurated.) Higgins’s memo, titled “POTUS & Political Warfare,” contained a long list of the president’s supposed enemies, among them “deep state actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans.” It went on to present a Trumpian view of how the administration should respond to its foes.

“The administration has been maneuvered into a constant back-pedal by relentless political warfare attacks structured to force him to assume a reactive posture that assures inadequate responses,” part of it reads. “The president can either drive or be driven by events; it’s time for him to drive them.”

Higgins was fired by Flynn’s saner replacement H. R. McMaster, but one administration official went on the record agreeing with him. A government source told Foreign Policy magazine, which published the memo, that its purpose was to warn Trump. “The memo maybe reads a little crazy, sure, but it’s not wrong and Rich isn’t crazy,” the official said.

At its extreme edge, Deep Statism looks a lot like the New World Order suspicions that came before it: a fear of total domination, subjugation, literal slavery. “The goals of the deep state are simple,” wrote the conspiracy-addled finance site Zero Hedge. “The complete enslavement of mankind by political elites.” The site is run by a former hedge fund analyst named Daniel Ivandjiiski, who was barred from Wall Street for insider trading in 2008 and, like a lot of people who are out of better ideas, started blogging. Ivandjiiski and other contributors to the site wrote under the pseudonym “Tyler Durden.” He, or they, fretted with increasing zeal about Trump being impeached by the Deep State, a pit stop on the journey to global enslavement.

“It has been apparent to those not blinded by partisan politics that something is going on in the government right now,” offered one post. “Yet most simply call it a ‘witch hunt,’ simply for lack of wanting to admit the deep state exists. It certainly looks like a battle between democracy and the deep state. And we aren’t sure we’d put money on democracy at this point in history.”

Along these lines, Stone, in an interview with the Harvard Political Review, blamed the Deep State for a looming coup attempt (and for the president’s ignorance about world events). “I have come to this conclusion that we are witnessing a slow-motion coup by the deep state, the very people that opposed the presidential election,” Stone told the journal. “They have used illegal and unconstitutional leaks to destabilize his presidency. The generals have pretty much taken control of the White House and are seeking to isolate the president and limit his access to information. I am surprised how much he does not know.”

Right-wing gasbag Rush Limbaugh echoed Stone. “There is already a silent coup,” he told his audience, perhaps misunderstanding what a coup is, “and it’s been under way for quite a while to get rid of Donald Trump.” And Mike Cernovich predicted that the Deep State would eventually turn deadly. “Trump will be killed,” he told Jones. “They’re going to kill us. They’re going to kill him, they’re going to kill everybody.”

That kind of language—setting up an immediate, apocalyptic battle between the meager forces of good and the pervasive foot soldiers of evil—is a hallmark of conspiracism (and again, has often served as a justification for authoritarianism). The ultraconservative legal activist group Judicial Watch released a report awash with such language, claiming that the Deep State comprised the EPA, the IRS, law enforcement agencies, and, of course, career civil servants throughout the government. “No matter who’s in power, they exert control,” Judicial Watch wrote. The organization also called the Deep State “dangerously malignant,” suggesting a cancer needing to be cut out by any means necessary—an immediate kill-or-be-killed scenario for Trump.

“Sometimes, as it has with the Trump presidency, the Deep State rises to the surface in rebellion,” the report stated, “taking aggressive, seditious measures against a president whose election it opposed and who it perceives to be a threat to its own agenda and, perhaps, its very survival. As already is clear with the Trump presidency, the Deep State can turn on any president that threatens its interests and survival. And left unchecked, it may illegally destroy him.”

As those on the far right fulminated about imminent global takeovers, they were matched on the left by its own paranoia. The left’s fears of conspiracies and collusion made for some very strange bedfellows. Elements of the anti-Trump resistance saw the Kremlin’s agents everywhere and so found themselves cheering on the intelligence institutions doing battle in Russiagate—the same institutions historically distrusted by the left, and with good reason. People like James Comey, the FBI director fired by Trump, became a hero to liberals, although they reviled him during the elections for his role in the scandal over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state.

The Russia frenzy produced rhetoric that replicated that on the conspiratorial far right, along with conspiracy stars to espouse it. Eric Garland, a small-time economic consultant and self-described “futurist” (how he actually earned a living was opaque), became well known overnight for a one-hundred-twenty-seven-tweet thread. His exhausting missive began with the words “Time for some game theory” and culminated in a sweeping, not-altogether-coherent account of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The tweetstorm garnered sincere praise from legitimate reporters; Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffrey called it the “single greatest thread I have ever read on Twitter. And in its way a Federalist Paper for 2016.”

Praise from such credible journalists encouraged Garland to spend the next year identifying various people he thought were in league with the Russians, which came to encompass a long list. At one point, Garland condemned Bernie Sanders as a Russian simp in terms that seemed borderline anti-Semitic. “Sanders is not a son of Vermont—he is not an inheritor of our values of inviolable liberty, sovereignty, justice, and law,” Garland declared of the state’s senator. “If Sanders will not stand with America—much less Vermont, my ancestral home—against Russia, he has betrayed both Republic and Country.”

Garland reached extremes that put him in the front ranks of the conspiracy-minded. “Let’s talk about this weeks sic events that already show that we’re in hyperdrive to expose a global criminal conspiracy,” he tweeted. He also sounded alarmingly unhinged, vowing, with a signature mix of all-caps and exaggeration, “I WON’T BE THE FIRST GARLAND OF MY LINE TO SPILL BLOOD FOR AMERICA AND THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY AND NEVER THE LAST, YOU FUCKERS.” Seth Abramson, an English professor and former lawyer who identified himself on social media as a political expert, wrote in November 2017, also on Twitter, “While the final pieces of proof must still be put into place, every indication we have *so far* is that the President has been and continues to be a Russian asset.”

In line with the conspiracist playbook, Russiagate even yielded false flag accusations. In an account called “A Hamilton Spirit,” a person claiming to be a psychiatrist garnered close to sixty thousand followers with rants connecting every event in the visible universe to Trump’s Russian ties. He implied that a mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival might have been staged—by whom, it wasn’t clear—in order to distract Democrats and somehow prevent them from filing articles of impeachment against Trump. A Hamilton Spirit seemed proud of the fact that he made logical connections no one else had. “I’ve always been really good at puzzles,” he explained.

Deep Staters and Russiagaters revealed an entire country in the grips of conspiracy thinking. Both sides considered themselves eminently reasonable, though, following the habits of the conspiracy-verse: they insisted they had done their research and arrived at the only sensible conclusion, and that their enemies were bought and paid for, and probably actors, plants, or spies. Left-wing comedian Jen Kirkman called Bernie Sanders a “Russian chaos agent,” while right-winger Steven Seagal, the partially fossilized action hero, wrote an entire novel based on his purported encounters with the Deep State, titled The Way of the Shadow Wolves. Referring to himself and coauthor Joe Morrissey, part of the novel’s introduction reads, “Shadow Wolves is a book of fiction based on reality. Both authors have worked with, confronted, and seen the power of the Deep State and the manner in which many federal government agencies willfully violate the Constitution and the laws of the land in service to special interests.”

The two camps operate with a specific kind of linguistic grandiosity, an overheated rhetorical style where every event, no matter how mundane, is part of a showdown between good and evil. The speaker/writer/tweeter is always standing alone at the gate, bravely pushing back the demonic hordes. And even thoughtful believers on the left also express their fear in terms of a coup.

The essay “Trial Balloon for a Coup,” published in Medium by a writer named Yonatan Zunger, went viral with claims that the Trump administration, in passing bans on immigration, was testing the resolve of the American populace to pave the way for a military coup. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the goal is to create ‘resistance fatigue,’” the author wrote, “to get Americans to the point where they’re more likely to say ‘Oh, another protest? Don’t you guys ever stop?’ relatively quickly.” Another essay in Medium also declared the immigration ban a “headfake,” designed to test whether the Trump administration could attempt a full-scale government takeover. It didn’t use the word “coup,” but came very close. “The administration,” the author, a San Francisco entrepreneur named Jake Fuentes, wrote, “is deliberately testing the limits of governmental checks and balances to set up a self-serving, dangerous consolidation of power.”

The Russiagate coup theory was stated explicitly on Patriobotics, a site that traffics in heated Trump–Putin conspiracizing. The site was set up by Louise Mensch, a former Conservative politician in Britain turned romance novelist who moved to New York in 2012 and became a journalist of sorts. Mensch was frequently joined by former NSA staffer John Schindler, as well as Claude Taylor, a freelance photographer who describes himself as a “former staffer” in the Clinton White House. (He worked in the volunteer office in 1993.) All three have generated devoted, almost fanatical followings, alongside a larger number of people calling them cranks and liars.

Among other things, Mensch suggested that Trump had been secretly indicted and handed a copy of that indictment on an airplane runway by the “Marshal of the Supreme Court,” which is not how indictments work. At one point she said that teams backed by Trump advisor Steve Bannon were behind a series of bomb threats phoned into Jewish community centers. (The threats were traced to a disgraced journalist trying to terrorize his ex and a disturbed Jewish teenager in Israel.)

In other Mensch assertions, Bannon was in for a pretty dark fate: “My sources say the death penalty, for espionage, being considered for @StevenKBannon,” she tweeted. “I am pro-life and take no pleasure in reporting this.” Additionally, Black Lives Matter was a Russian operation, for instance, directly funding protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Taylor reported on a criminal probe into Trump Models Management by the New York Attorney General based on a tip from an insider at the AG’s office. Separately, Mensch claimed that according to her sources, Trump “is linked to a Russian-based human trafficking enterprise, where girls and women were kidnapped into sexual slavery. This includes underage girls and minors.” Except there was no probe or source at the Attorney General’s office; Taylor was fed information by a hoaxer who told the Guardian she’d acted out of frustration at the “fake news” disseminated by Taylor and Mensch.

Despite the bizarre nature of her reports, Mensch had a sizable Twitter following, and people outside journalism were not always aware that she was not a credible political journalist. This in turn helped generate more uncertainty about what is real, who can be trusted, and who is a real journalist. And, to complicate matters further, Mensch did once get her hands on a genuine, newsworthy piece of information. In February 2017, she learned that the FISA court had granted a warrant to surveil two Trump aides who were suspected of having communications with banks linked to the Russian government. The reporting was confirmed by other outlets, which allowed Mensch and her followers to declare her legitimacy.

In a delicious irony, conspiracy theories emerged about Mensch herself: she was a Trump-backed plant, paid to make the Trump resistance look stupid. She was a Russian plant, paid to make the anti-Russia resistance look stupid. Meanwhile, Mensch argued that the resistance movement against Trump itself is a Russian plot.

If Russiagate is an example of citizens’ deep suspicion toward their government, it also prompted concern that it could lead to the reverse: the government’s suspicion of its citizens, which has resulted in some of the darkest periods in American history. A mania for ferreting out secret domestic enemies brought us McCarthysim and the life-ruining inquisitions of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and thousands of Japanese Americans being imprisoned in internment camps during the latter days of the Second World War.

Masha Gessen, for one, feared that anti-Russia paranoia could lead to a climate of McCarthy-esque persecution, suspicion, and witch hunts. Gessen warned that Russiagate was “promoting a xenophobic conspiracy theory in the cause of removing a xenophobic conspiracy theorist from office.” Press freedom organizations also worried that Russia-collusion panic could have a chilling effect on free speech. In September 2017, the FBI investigated whether Sputnik and RT were illegally spreading Russian propaganda without having registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. In November, RT did register as a foreign agent but planned to challenge the Justice Department’s order to do so in court.

Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, wrote that government control over news organizations is a bad idea. “No matter one’s feelings on Russia or Sputnik,” he wrote, “I think it’s concerning anytime the FBI gets involved in defining who is and isn’t a journalist.”

In any case, Sputnik and RT’s activities post-2016 were not new. They have long focused on true but unflattering aspects of American government to shape a narrative. They had plenty of material to work from: police violence, gun violence, government repression, enthusiastic drone use. With the exception of reporting by Sean Stone—director Oliver Stone’s adult son and an enthusiastic conspiracy theorist—a lot of their coverage looked like typical journalism. And the government’s response to Sputnik and RT gave both organizations grist for their mills. One Sputnik columnist condemned the suspicion against his outlet as part of the mainstream media plot against Trump. “Anyone, anywhere, who might be linked to Russia in any whichever way no matter how direct or indirect is suspected of being a ‘Kremlin agent,’” he wrote. “And that their interactions with American political campaigns constitute, at the very least, some form or another of ‘meddling.’”

In fairness, Russia did not by any means corner the market on state-sponsored propaganda pushing its message overseas. The Voice of America, a government-funded station that broadcasts around the globe—in more than one hundred countries and sixty-one languages—has done so since the Cold War. The United States always insisted that VOA was created to counter Soviet propaganda, not create our own, but that distinction has seemed awfully fuzzy.

The Deep State and Russiagate shared one other important characteristic. They both speedily took on the nature of something of great benefit to conspiracy sellers: formless, vast, amorphous modes of suspicion. They cast shadows that could grow to encompass any event, any discovery, or shrink to reveal a sunny, bright nothing. Conspiracist politicians and pundits only profit from an environment in which nothing is certain, everything is clouded by suspicion, and no source of information can be trusted.

If that sounds too, well, conspiratorial, consider one of Trump’s early and few press conferences, held in the first year of his presidency. He called the Russia collusion story “fake news put out by the media” and said that the reporters gathered were part of a press corps that was “out of control.” But, he suggested, soon it wouldn’t much matter. “The press, the public doesn’t believe you people anymore,” Trump told the room, beaming contentedly. “Now maybe I had something to do with that. I don’t know. But they don’t believe you.”

• laetrile
• LaLa
• Lancet
• Lane, David
• Lanza, Adam
• Las Vegas mass shooting
• Latinx people
• Lavender, Barbara
• Lazar, Bob
• lead
• League of the South
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• Lerner, Irving
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• Libertarians
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• Lil Wayne
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• London Telegraph
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• Manual for Those Who Think That They Must Pay an Income Tax, A (Porth)
• marijuana
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• mass shootings. See also specific incidents
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• Matrix, The (film)
• May, Theresa
• Mayo Clinic
• McCarthy, Evan
• McCarthy, Jenny
• McCarthyism
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• military-industrial complex
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• Mintz, Frank P.
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• MKUltra
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• Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks
• moon landing
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• Morton, Melissa Thomson
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• Moscow protests (2011)
• Mossad
• Mother Jones
• motivated reasoning
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• MSNBC
• Mueller, Robert
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• Muhammad, Elijah
• Muhammad, Tony
• Muslim Brotherhood
• Muslims. See also Islamophobia
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• Myco-ZX

• National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
• National Alliance
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• National Cancer Institute
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• Nixon, Richard
• nocturnal ritual fantasy
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• Noory, George
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• Oklahoma City bombing
• Oliver, Eric
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• Open Society and Its Enemies, The (Popper)
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• Pakistan
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• paper terrorism
• Paranoia Magazine
• “Paranoid Style in American Politics, The” (Hofstadter)
• Parent, Joseph
• Parkland school shooting
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• Passover
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• Patriot Act
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• Patton, Charley
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• pedophiles. See also Pizzagate; QAnon
• Perry, Scott
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• Pikeville, Kentucky, rally
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• racism. See also white supremacy
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• Roswell, New Mexico
• Roswell Incident, The (Berlitz and Moore)
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• Royal Free Hospital (London)
• RT (Russia Today)
• Rubio, Marco
• Ruby Ridge standoff
• Russia
• Russiagate
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• Salaman, Frank
• Salaman, Maureen Kenney
• Salem witch trials
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• San Bernardino mass shooting
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• Satan
• Satanic Panic
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• Seattle protests (1999)
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• segregation
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• self-investigators
• September 11, 2001 attacks (9/11)
• LIHOP vs. MIHOP and
• Sessions, Jeff
• sex workers
• S-4 facility
• Sharia law
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• Signal (app)
• Silicon Valley
• Simon of Trent
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• Sky Soldier
• Slate
• Sleuth Journal
• smallpox vaccine
• Smith, Michelle
• Smith, Steve
• Smith, Will
• Snoop Dogg
• Snowden, Edward
• social media. See also specific sites
• Solar Warden
• Solon, Olivia
• Somali parents
• “Somebody Blew Up America” (Baraka)
• Soros, George
• Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)
• South Sudan
• South Vietnam, coup of 1963
• sovereign citizen movement
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• Spencer, Richard
• Spencer, Sherry
• Sphere-Being Alliance
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• “Spirit Cooking” (Abramović)
• Spotify
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• Standing Rock protests
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• Starfire Water
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• State Department
• Steele, Christopher
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• sterilization, forced
• Stewart, Corey
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• Stone, Roger
• Stone, Sean
• Strange Universe (radio show)
• straw-man persona
• Street, The
• Sugiura, Kanematsu
• Sunday Times (London)
• SUNSHINE, Project
• Sunstein, Cass
• Suspicious Minds (Brotherton)
• Sutherland Springs church shootings
• Sweden
• syphilis
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• Tacitus
• tax deniers
• Taylor, Claude
• Tea Party
• Tebb, William
• 1099 OID form
• Tenpenny, Sherri
• terrorism
• Texas Tribune
• thalidomide
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• Them (Ronson)
• This Week (TV show)
• Thomas, Brian “Sonny”
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• TigerSwan
• Timm, Trevor
• TI (rapper)
• Today (TV show)
• ToolsForFreedom.com
• “Top Secret America” (Priest and Arkin)
• Total Fascism
• Tracy, James
• Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP)
• Treasury Department
• “Trial Balloon for a Cup” (Zunger)
• Truman, Harry
• Trump, Donald
• anti-Semitism and
• birtherism and
• blacks and
• Deep State and
• election of
• fake news and
• far-right news and
• immigration and
• Islamophobia and
• Jones and
• Mercers and
• 9/11 and
• Pizzagate and
• QAnon and
• racism and
• Russiagate and
• Seth Rich and
• tax deniers and
• white supremacists and
• Trump, Donald, Jr.
• Trump, Melania
• Trump Models Management
• Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar
• Tsarnaev, Tamerlan
• Tulsa Race Riots
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• Turner, Ted
• Turner Diaries, The (Pierce)
• Tuskegee experiment
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• Two Feathers

• UFO Contactees (film)
• UFOs
• UFO Watchdog
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• Unite the Right rallies
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• Washington DC
• Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI)
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• Ussery, Robert (“Side Thorn”)
• U-2 spy plane

• Vaccination Act (Britain; 1898)
• Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System
• Vaccine Roulette (documentary)
• vaccines
• Vallée, Jacques
• Vanguard America
• Vatican
• Vaxxed (film)
• Venezuela
• Ventre, John
• Vermeule, Adrian
• Veterans on Patrol (VOP)
• Veterans Today
• Vice
• Vietnam War
• Visionbox
• vitamin B17
• vitamins and supplements
• Voat (message board)
• Voice of America (VOA)
• voting. See also elections

• Waco, Texas
• biker shootout
• FBI standoff
• Wakefield, Andrew
• Wakefield, Carmel
• Wake Up World
• Walker, Jesse
• Walter Fernald State School
• Warner, Mark
• warrantless wiretapping
• Warren Commission
• Washington, George
• Washington Post
• Washington Times
• Washitaw Nation
• Watergate scandal
• Waters, Maxine
• Waters, Roger
• water supply. See also Flint lead crisis
• Watson, Paul Joseph
• Way of the Shadow Wolves, The (Seagal)
• Weaver, Sammy
• Weaver, Vicki
• Weil, Andrew
• Weiner, Anthony
• Weinstein, Harvey
• Weishaupt, Adam
• Welch, Edgar M.
• Welsome, Eileen
• West, Kanye
• West Memphis Three
• WhatDoesItMean.com
• Wheeler, Rod
• whistleblowers
• White, Michael
• White Helmets
• “white identity extremists”
• whites
• white supremacy (white nationalism)
• WikiLeaks
• Wikipedia
• Wilcock, David
• Wilcox, George
• Wilders, Geert
• Wilson, Laurel Rose
• Wilson, Stephen V.
• Wired
• Wolfe, Neil
• Wolfe, David “Avocado”
• Wolfowitz, Paul
• Wood, Thomas
• WordPress
• World Church of the Creator
• World Health Organization (WHO)
• World Jewry
• WorldNetDaily (WND)
• World Trade Organization (WTO)
• World War II
• World Without Cancer (Griffin)
• Wright, Jeremiah
• Wright, Matthew P.

• Yellowhair, Milo
• Yiannopoulos, Milo
• Yoo, Luke
• YouGov
• Young, Robbin
• Young Lords
• YouTube

• Zaitchik, Alexander
• Zero Hedge
• Zimbabwe
• Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG)
• Zionists
• Zunger, Yonatan