Kelly Ferro is a busy mom on her way to the post office:leather mini-backpack, brunet topknot, turquoise pedicure with a matching ombrémanicure. A hairdresser from Kenosha, Wis., Ferro didn’t vote in 2016 but hassince become a strong supporter of Donald Trump. “Why does the news hate thePresident so much?” she says. “I went down the rabbit hole. I started doing alot of research.”
When I ask what she means by research, something shifts. Hervoice has the same honey tone as before, and her face is as friendly as ever.But there’s an uncanny flash as she says, “This is where I don’t know what Ican say, because what’s integrated into our system, it stems deep. And it hasto do with really corrupt, evil, dark things that have been hidden from thepublic. Child sex trafficking is one of them.”
Ferro may not have even realized it, but she was parrotingelements of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a pro-Trump viral delusion that beganin 2017 and has spread widely over recent months, migrating from far-rightcorners of the Internet to infect ordinary voters in the suburbs. Its followersbelieve President Trump is a hero safeguarding the world from a “deep state”cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, Democratic politicians and Hollywoodcelebrities who run a global sex-trafficking ring, harvesting the blood ofchildren for life-sustaining chemicals.
None of this is even remotely true. But an alarming numberof Americans have been exposed to these wild ideas. There are thousands ofQAnon groups and pages on Facebook, with millions of members, according to aninternal company document reviewed by NBC News. Dozens of QAnon-friendlycandidates have run for Congress, and at least three have won GOP primaries.Trump has called its adherents “people that love our country.”
In more than seven dozen interviews conducted in Wisconsinin early September, from the suburbs around Milwaukee to the scarred streets ofKenosha in the aftermath of the Jacob Blake shooting, about 1 in 5 votersvolunteered ideas that veered into the realm of conspiracy theory, ranging fromQAnon to the notion that COVID-19 is a hoax. Two women in Ozaukee County calmlyinformed me that an evil cabal operates tunnels under the U.S. in order to rapeand torture children and drink their blood. A Joe Biden supporter near aKenosha church told me votes don’t matter, because “the elites” will decide theoutcome of the election anyway. A woman on a Kenosha street corner explainedthat Democrats were planning to bring in U.N. troops before the election toprevent a Trump win
It’s hard to know exactly why people believe what theybelieve. Some had clearly been exposed to QAnon conspiracy theorists online.Others seemed to be repeating false ideas espoused in Plandemic, a pair ofconspiracy videos featuring a discredited former medical researcher that wentviral, spreading the notion that COVID-19 is a hoax across social media.(COVID-19 is not a hoax.) When asked where they found their information, almostall these voters were cryptic: “Go online,” one woman said. “Dig deep,” addedanother. They seemed to share a collective disdain for the mainstream media–askepticism that has only gotten stronger and deeper since 2016. The truthwasn’t reported, they said, and what was reported wasn’t true.
This matters not just because of what these voters believebut also because of what they don’t. The facts that should anchor a sense ofshared reality are meaningless to them; the news developments that mightordinarily inform their vote fall on deaf ears. They will not be swayed by dataon coronavirus deaths, they won’t be persuaded by job losses or stock marketgains, and they won’t care if Trump called America’s fallen soldiers “losers”or “suckers,” as the Atlantic reported, because they won’t believe it. They areimpervious to messaging, advertising or data. They aren’t just infected withconspiracy; they appear to be inoculated against reality.
Democracy relies on an informed and engaged publicresponding in rational ways to the real-life facts and challenges before us.But a growing number of Americans are untethered from that. “They’re not on thesame epistemological grounding, they’re not living in the same worlds,” saysWhitney Phillips, a professor at Syracuse who studies online disinformation.“You cannot have a functioning democracy when people are not at the very leastoccupying the same solar system.”
American politics has always been prone to spasms ofconspiracy. The historian Richard Hofstadter famously called it “an arena forangry minds.” In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Americans wereconvinced that the Masons were an antigovernment conspiracy; populists in the1890s warned of the “secret cabals” controlling the price of gold; in the 20thcentury, McCarthyism and the John Birch Society fueled a wave of anti-Communistdelusions that animated the right. More recently, Trump helped seed a racistlie that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.
As a candidate in 2016, Trump seemed to promote a new wildconspiracy every week, from linking Ted Cruz’s father to the Kennedy assassinationto suggesting Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered. In interviewsat Trump rallies that year, I heard voters espouse all manner of delusions:that the government was run by drug cartels; that Obama was a foreign-bornMuslim running for a third term; that Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster killed.But after four years of a Trump presidency, the paranoia is no longer relegatedto the margins of society. According to the Pew Research Center, 25% ofAmericans say there is some truth to the conspiracy theory that the COVID-19pandemic was intentionally planned. (Virologists, global health officials andU.S. intelligence and national-security officials have all dismissed the ideathat the pandemic was human-engineered, although Trump Administration officialshave said they have not ruled out the possibility that it was the result of anaccident in a lab.) In a recent poll of nearly 1,400 people by left-leaningCiviqs/Daily Kos, more than half of Republican respondents believed some partof QAnon: 33% said they believed the conspiracy was “mostly true,” while 26%said “some parts” are true.
Over a week of interviews in early September, I heardbaseless conspiracies from ordinary Americans in parking lots and boutiques andstrip malls from Racine to Cedarburg to Wauwatosa, Wis. Shaletha Mayfield, aBiden supporter from Racine, says she thinks Trump created COVID-19 and willbring it back again in the fall. Courtney Bjorn, a Kenosha resident who votedfor Clinton in 2016 and plans to vote for Biden, lowered her voice as shespeculated about the forces behind the destruction in her city. “No rich peoplelost their buildings,” she says. “Who benefits when neighborhoods burn down?”
But by far the greatest delusions I heard came from voterson the right. More than a third of the Trump supporters I spoke with voicedsome kind of conspiratorial thinking. “COVID could have been released bycommunist China to bring down our economy,” says John Poulos, loading groceriesinto his car outside Sendik’s grocery store in the Milwaukee suburb ofWauwatosa. “COVID was manufactured,” says Maureen Bloedorn, walking into aDollar Tree in Kenosha. She did not vote for Trump in 2016 but plans to supporthim in November, in part because “he sent Obama a bill for all of his vacationshe took on the American dime.” This idea was popularized by a fake news storythat originated on a satirical website and went viral.
On a cigarette break outside their small business in OzaukeeCounty, Tina Arthur and Marcella Frank told me they plan to vote for Trumpagain because they are deeply alarmed by “the cabal.” They’ve heard “numerousreports” that the COVID-19 tents set up in New York and California wereactually for children who had been rescued from underground sex-traffickingtunnels.
Arthur and Frank explained they’re not followers of QAnon.Frank says she spends most of her free time researching child sex trafficking,while Arthur adds that she often finds this information on the Russian-ownedsearch engine Yandex. Frank’s eyes fill with tears as she describes what she’sfound: children who are being raped and tortured so that “the cabal” can“extract their blood and drink it.” She says Trump has seized the blood on theblack market as part of his fight against the cabal. “I think if Biden wins,the world is over, basically,” adds Arthur. “I would honestly try to leave thecountry. And if that wasn’t an option, I would probably take my children andsit in the garage and turn my car on and it would be over.”
The rise in conspiratorial thinking is the product ofseveral interrelated trends: declining trust in institutions; demise of localnews; a social-media environment that makes rumor easy to spread and difficultto debunk; a President who latches onto anything and anyone he thinks will helphis political fortunes. It’s also a part of our wiring. “The brain likescrazy,” says Nicco Mele, the former director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center,who studies the spread of online disinformation and conspiracies. Because ofthis, experts say, algorithms on platforms like Facebook and YouTube aredesigned to serve up content that reinforces existing beliefs–learning whatusers search for and feeding them more and more extreme content in an attemptto keep them on their sites.
All this madness contributes to a political imbalance. Onthe right, conspiracy theories make Trump voters even more loyal to thePresident, whom many see as a warrior against enemies in the “deep state.” Italso protects him against an October surprise, as no matter what news emergesabout Trump, a growing group of U.S. voters simply won’t believe it. On theleft, however, conspiracy theories often weaken voters’ allegiance to Biden bymaking them less likely to trust the voting process. If they believe theirvotes won’t matter because shadowy elites are pulling the country’s strings,why bother going through the trouble of casting a ballot?
Experts who follow disinformation say nothing will changeuntil Facebook and YouTube shift their business model away from the algorithmsthat reward conspiracies. “We are not anywhere near peak crazy,” says Mele.Phillips, the professor from Syracuse, agrees that things will get weirder.“We’re in trouble,” she adds. “Words sort of fail to capture what a nightmarescenario this is.”
But to voters like Kelly Ferro, the mass delusion seems morelike a mass awakening. Trump “is revealing these things,” she says serenely,gesturing with her turquoise-tipped fingernails. Americans’ “eyes are beingopened to the darkness that was once hidden.”
After yoga in the morning, Ferro says, she often spendshours watching videos, immersing herself in a world she believes is bringingher ever closer to the truth. “You can’t stop, because it’s so addicting tohave this knowledge of what kind of world we’re living in,” she says. “We’reliving in an alternate reality.”