from clueless to qanon: how random people get caught up in conspiracy panics

A new study hints that many QAnon believers weren't far right paranoiacs but totally apolitical bystanders. But how and why were they sucked into Satanic Panic 2.0?

In news junkie circles, being called a “low info voter” is effectively a slur, a way of very condescendingly labeling someone a blissfully ignorant know-nothing. But according to a former GOP strategist, this label would more than likely describe not some group of abject burnouts frozen in front of screens mouth agape, but most American voters. If anything, it’s the terminally online who are the aberration, as the majority of people simply go about their lives.

They surf social media for pop culture news, memes, celebrity gossip, and scores for games they missed. They come home to watch their favorite sports, reality TV, crime procedurals, and a game show or two. In the voting booth, they generally just go with their gut, and their main source of news tends to be a friend or colleague “who knows a lot about politics” and skimming headlines as they scroll on their smartphones.

When you look at the voter base this way, suddenly, a lot of things make sense. Why is no one talking about the latest political scandal? A lot of people missed it and don’t much care, which means news editors are likely to move on quickly. Why are so many voters afraid of rising crime waves despite actual crime being at a 50 year low? Could it be local news dedicating outsized coverage to it, and a steady diet of crime shows in which cops are almost always flawless heroes who catch the bad guy despite how often criminals go free and lies or junk science sends innocent people to jail?

But no matter how much you try to bury your head in the sand these days and avoid politics and news, it’s simply impossible to fully escape the feeling that things are very rapidly changing, those changes are just the beginning, everyone seems to be in their own, bizarre little reality these days, and is becoming more and more deranged. And on top of that, when you do tune in, you find a parade of deeply unsettling events.

For people used to gliding through the world by inertia, having to finally pay attention to what feels a radioactive dumpster fire of scandals, upheavals, and disinformation at such scales that “doing your own research” is very likely to lead you into la-la land, is a deeply disturbing endeavor, and this is especially true when they realize they don’t have the tools to properly navigate this hellscape.

Then, when they’re lost in the darkness they finally find what looks like a bright light at the end of the tunnel. Which is actually attached to a runaway train called QAnon.

from zero to alienation at the speed of the web

Now, there are many ways to define QAnon because as the official far right conspiracy theory of everything, it’s extremely broad and covers an absurd number of beliefs, all of them usually terminating in something related to cannibalism, pedophilia, Satanism, and the need for unwavering support of reactionary political parties. But perhaps the most succinct and comprehensive way to describe it is as a third Satanic Panic with a heavy MMORPG component.

Rather than passively watch scandalous tales of Satanic daycares and listen to made up “confessions” of supposed cultists about meeting celebrities between sacrificing children to demons and engaging in sexual perversions, you play as a Digital Patriot™ armed with a laptop and a secret mission from Donald Trump and his staffers to track down devil worshipping communists using bunkers under pizzerias to torture and eat children, or brainwashing them as future victims or cult members in schools.

“All right, I see where you’re going with this. People who already believe in something like this gravitate to QAnon. So, if you’re addicted to decoding ‘the hidden messages from the elites’ in political news, this would be right up your alley, right?”

Well, according to new research, the answer is not as straightforward. Sure, QAnon is catnip for right wing conspiracy theorists, but a surprising number of its victims were apparently not even remotely interested in politics prior to discovering the conspiracy, fitting the profile of the “average low info voter” to a tee by their families.

The study itself is actually fascinating. Rather than painting with broad brushstrokes, a pair of researchers decided to sit down and thoroughly interview 15 members of the r/QAnonCasualties community, which is focused on supporting families of those who lost their minds to the conspiracy and cut ties with their families and former friends. It helps to think of it like a quarter million plus strong support group trying to figure out what happened to their loved ones before they seemingly lost their minds.

Yes, half of the study’s participants did note that the QAnon disciples in their lives had some history of right wing politics and maybe even conspiratorial leanings. That’s kind of expected. But the other half were described as apolitical, if not left-wing before one day suddenly turning to the Gospel of Q and rapidly becoming increasingly isolated or angry and proselytizing, xenophobic, and increasingly detached from reality, resulting in emotional whiplash for their families.

Of course, given the small sample size, we can’t definitively say that half of all QAnon followers were apolitical or left-leaning. But there are numerous testimonials from ex-disciples saying that COVID quarantines, boredom, and disillusionment led them to a convenient theory of everything that also gave them a purpose, not the pre-existing belief that “the globalists were up to something,” and they simply didn’t know what.

an idle mind is a conspiracy theory’s plaything

In short, it’s perfectly plausible that boredom, anxiety, or desperation could be driving a non-trivial number of people into the arms of conspiracy cults. These people need a purpose and hope, and lost in the flood of gloom and doom — much of it inaccurate, or grossly sensationalized, or tinged with toxic bothsidesism, or outright fake — they’ll desperately latch on to something that finally gives them meaning.

Even if it’s sinister, even if it’s dark, it’s better than what they have now. And all those interactive elements of QAnon I mentioned previously make it especially attractive to the bored and anxious. It doesn’t just scare them with the Chinese Globalist Satanic Marxist cannibal pedophile cabal doing their evil deeds in every government office, playground, school, and closet. It gives them something to do.

It tells them that they too can get involved, spending their days in front of a computer doing “research” or “engaging in memetic warfare” to catch these evildoers and help St. Donald the Orange of House MAGA, who will usher in a Unified Reich… err… unify true, red-blooded American patriots — but like, red blooded in a different way than all those communists who are also really into red — and create a thousand year utopia of “white hats” who’ll no longer tolerate the blight consuming America and the world.

They don’t need to be politically obsessed, just feel like their lives are slipping out of control and they have no real purpose. This accurately describes the feelings of 3 in 5 young Americans and is a symptom of depression, rates of which soared during, and in the aftermath, of the pandemic. With half of adults trapped in jobs they find boring at best on top of all this, there’s plenty of fertile ground for seemingly quiet, apolitical, maybe even left-leaning casual voters to fall to QAnon’s siren calls.

Add a mental health issue, especially one that’s undiagnosed or just buried under the surface, or developed during right before or during COVID and festered, and you get an even more abrupt and radical conversion story.

This would also fall in line with a study of mental conditions of QAnon followers in the aftermath of the January 6th insurrection. Nearly 7 in 10 insurrectionists were die hard believers who at one point or another were diagnosed with bipolar disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, PTSD, anxiety, depression, or addiction. For reference, these rates are between double and quadruple of typical Americans, depending on the condition.

So, what does all this tell us? If you want to inoculate yourself and others from falling prey to rabid conspiracy theories that function like a cult and pose a danger to basic civil society and self-governance, don’t just look for the paranoid, obsessed, and the politically opinionated and argumentative. The bored, aimless, disillusioned, and the depressed are also at significant risk.

We should also note that any society which doesn’t want its citizens to tear itself from inside out needs to make sure that its citizens feel that they have a purpose beyond being just a cog in a machine needed to sustain an oligarchic dystopia, and that their leaders actually care about them and want to make their lives better. Otherwise, they will find a new, different reality in which to lose themselves. Maybe even a sinister and exploitable one that arms its followers with toxic purpose, and turns to violence when its fantasies fail to come true.

See: Mastroni, L., Mooney, R. (2024). “I one-hundred thousand percent blame it on QAnon”: The impact of QAnon belief on interpersonal relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, DOI: 10.1177/02654075241246124