People who question whether the Earth is round — a fact understood by the ancient Greeks and taught to American children in elementary school — might have been political pariahs a decade ago. Now, they’re running local Republican parties in Georgia and Minnesota and seeking public office in Alabama.
A prominent far-right activist who has said, despite years of research and intelligence establishing otherwise, that the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were an inside job by the U.S. government commemorated the 9/11 anniversary last year alongside President Trump.
And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, pledged the agency’s support last month for a fight involving so-called chemtrails, a debunked theory that the white condensation lines streaming behind airplanes are toxic, or could even be used for nefarious purposes.
Conspiracy theories that were relegated to random and often anonymous online forums are now being championed or publicly debated by increasingly powerful people. Mr. Trump in particular has embraced, elevated and even appointed to his cabinet people promoting these theories — giving the ideas a persuasive authority and a dangerous proximity to policy.
“The real problem with the ideas and the communication of conspiracy theories is when they get evinced by people with the power to act on them,” said Joseph E. Uscinski, a professor at the University of Miami who studies conspiracy theories. “If some guy, somewhere, thinks the Earth is flat, the answer is ‘So what?’ But when people in power have those beliefs, it becomes a serious issue.”
He added: “You can wind up harming many, many people over a fantasy.”
Anna Kelly, a spokeswoman for the White House, said in a statement that the mainstream media “has tried and failed to paint President Trump as extreme for his entire political career” and that his agenda was “common sense.”
Debunked narratives about election fraud and vaccines have proliferated in national discourse over the past five years. A pro-Trump movement known as QAnon, which makes outlandish claims that there is a global sex-trafficking operation backed by the so-called deep state, was found at one point to be as popular in the United States as some major religions.
But the conspiracy theories now graduating into the mainstream were, until recently, far more marginal. And the people voicing them are growing more influential.
Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, the billionaire who has been called the “unelected co-president,” have repeatedly suggested this year, without any evidence and against the assurances of current and former Treasury secretaries, that the Fort Knox gold reserves may have been stolen.
Anna Paulina Luna, a second-term Republican representative from Florida whom Mr. Trump endorsed, has said she believes that two shooters were involved in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy — a conclusion that past inquiries into the assassination and the release of 64,000 related documents in March have not proved. Ms. Luna is now heading a task force established to examine the “declassification of federal secrets” and has pledged to investigate topics that have long preoccupied conspiracy theorists, including so-called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, the Covid-19 pandemic, files related to 9/11 and Jeffrey Epstein’s client list (a recent document dump related to the disgraced financier revealed little).
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — a Georgia Republican known for voicing conspiracy theories about Sept. 11, school shootings and wildfires started by Jews wielding space lasers — is in her third term. In the midst of two devastating hurricanes this fall, she posted online that “they can control the weather,” nodding to a false narrative suggesting that the government can manifest storms.
Four years ago, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader at the time, condemned the sorts of “loony lies and conspiracy theories” that Ms. Greene embraced as a “cancer for the Republican Party and our country.” She is now considering either a Senate or a governor bid. When contacted by a reporter, a spokesman for the congresswoman said his only comment was that the reporter was “insane.”
Outlandish theories are being enabled and rewarded by the online ecosystem, said Cynthia S. Wang, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where she runs the Dispute Resolution Research Center. Social media platforms, she said, sort people into echo chambers, facilitate the production of convincingly sleek posts and use engagement metrics to encourage content that provokes a reaction.
Add in a chaotic news cycle, filled with wars, natural disasters, economic turmoil and other anxiety-inducing features, and conspiracy theories become even more appealing because they seem to explain inexplicable things, experts said.
“A lot of people in authority know that this rhetoric is powerful — it is a way to stoke uncertainty and then say, ‘Hey, if you listen to me, I can help you with your uncertainty and make sure that you and your group are going to be OK,’” Dr. Wang said. “That’s really comforting.”
Politicians understand that conspiracy theories are “what scratches our collective psychic itch” at the moment, said John Llewellyn, an associate professor of communication at Wake Forest University who studies urban legends and rhetoric. Repeating such narratives, and promising to act on them, enables a sort of rhetorical sleight of hand, like performing a card trick with the right hand to misdirect from what is happening with the left, he said.
Pursuing policy action on nonexistent dangers of chemtrails, for example, allows officials to deliver “symbolic satisfaction that doesn’t require any tax increases or wrestling with health care challenges or otherwise solve any of the real and emergent problems in our society,” Mr. Llewellyn said.
The wild narratives are causing real-world trouble.
The correlation between support for political violence and the tendency to classify events and circumstances as results of conspiracies tripled in magnitude from 2012 to 2022, according to an essay published in December by several researchers, including Dr. Uscinski of the University of Miami. The researchers theorized that the surge could have been caused by a steady rise in polarization, a decline in trust in institutions or Mr. Trump’s conspiratorial and violent language.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonpartisan think tank, identified a rash of violent incidents last year linked to perpetrators influenced by conspiracy theories about chemtrails, 9/11, elections, the pandemic and more. One was a man who — fueled by rage against the government, immigrants, the gay community and the Black Lives Matter movement, according to prosecutors — killed and then beheaded his father, a former federal employee.
“For radicalized individuals, whose worldviews are warped by these theories and who are already primed to commit violence, political developments and other events have the potential to serve as catalysts to action,” researchers wrote.
A feedback loop of conspiracy theories has formed at every level of American government, according to watchdog groups. Efforts to break the chain are weakening: Misinformation and disinformation researchers have faced years of political pressure, including a decision by the National Science Foundation last month to terminate grants related to research in the field.
What other topics are going from shunned to the spotlight? Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, a left-wing advocacy group that monitors misinformation, said he was “pretty bullish on demons as the next big one.”
Mr. Trump referred to “demonic forces” on the campaign trail and called Democrats a “very demonic party.” Days before interviewing both Donald Trump Jr. and Mr. Musk at Mar-a-Lago on Election Day, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, posted a YouTube video claiming he had been attacked in the night “by a demon or by something unseen.” Dan Bongino, a right-wing pundit and podcaster who is now the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said on his show that “demon energy is real.”
“It’s no longer an abstraction — it’s about straight-up demons,” Mr. Carusone said. “The fever swamps are all of our reality right now.”
