Are You a Conspiracy Theorist?

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E i mentioned to ant, people actually believe it. Well, we know for sure that one guy, edgar welch, believed the a petgate thing was going on,. cause he went to the pingpon peeria with a guny and want to know where the base gat was. And they were like, there's no basement here. No one w a showed it, arrested, yes, yes, ye. They think that he was sent there, yo, know, to destroy evidence by now shooting into the wall with with his gun. And he was there to make them all look bad. I mean, they, they, there is never any accountability in these movements

Michael Shermer speaks with Mike Rothschild, a journalist specializing in conspiracy theories, about QAnon and its followers.

On October 5th, 2017, President Trump made a cryptic remark in the State Dining Room at a gathering of military officials. He said it felt like “the calm before the storm” — then refused to elaborate as puzzled journalists asked him to explain. But on the infamous message boards of 4chan, a mysterious poster going by “Q Clearance Patriot,” who claimed to be in “military intelligence,” began the elaboration on their own. In the days that followed, Q’s wild yarn explaining Trump’s remarks began to rival the sinister intricacies of a Tom Clancy novel, while satisfying the deepest desires of MAGA-America. But did any of what Q predicted come to pass? No. Did that stop people from clinging to every word they were reading, expanding its mythology, and promoting it wider and wider? No. Why not?