Conspiracy theories dominate much of the internet and form the rabid core of MAGA canon: That the January 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation; that vaccines cause autism; and that the 2020 election was “rigged.”
In the…
Conspiracy theories dominate much of the internet and form the rabid core of MAGA canon: That the January 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation; that vaccines cause autism; and that the 2020 election was “rigged.”
In the runup to his second campaign, Trump egged on the believers of QAnon, reposting Q-related content and playing QAnon songs (yes, there is such a thing) in his campaign rallies and videos. (As of 2022, as many as 1 in 5 Americans—and 1 in 4 Republicans—were QAnon believers. MAGA’s conspiracist roots run so deep that they even ultimately precipitated a crack in Trump’s base. Adherents perceived the administration’s failure to release the “Epstein files” as a betrayal of QAnon’s key tenets: that a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophilic elites secretly run the world, that Epstein was “proof” of this scheme, and that it was Trump’s destiny to “save the children.”
While social scientists and politicians have struggled with strategies to beat back the tide of conspiracies, YouTuber and cultural critic Natalie Wynn—known as ContraPoints—is reaching vast audiences with her videos. Wynn, an ex-philosophy PhD student, has built an award-winning commentary channel dedicated to countering the rising tide of right-wing extremism on YouTube. She produces extensively researched, expertly set-designed, and meticulously costumed feature-length video essays for an audience of 1.9 million subscribers. “One of the hallmarks of Wynn’s rhetorical style is her ability to get her viewers to see things from another person’s point of view,” Nancy Jo Sales wrote in a 2021 Guardian profile.
Her latest video, “CONSPIRACY,” has racked up more than 4 million views with a deep dive into the history and dynamics of conspiracist thinking in America, and how conspiracism undermines democracy. The success of her approach could hold important lessons for how to loosen conspiracists’ grip on American politics.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at YouTube, Spotify and iTunes.
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Anne Kim: To set the table for our audience, you host a YouTube channel under your alter ego, ContraPoints, which has nearly two million subscribers. You’ve won awards for your commentary and you’ve been fearless in your dissections of right-wing ideology. You’ve critiqued incel culture, transphobia, and racism, and done video essays that have covered a wide range of topics, ethics, politics, gender, philosophy. I think you were once a PhD student in philosophy. Your latest video, “CONSPIRACY,” is a two hour 40 minute tour de force. There’s really no other way to describe it. It’s about conspiracist thinking in America, and I found every minute to be riveting. We want to talk about your approach in creating this video, but what prompted you to tackle this topic in the first place?
**Natalie Wynn: **Thank you. My channel has often covered fringe aspects of digital culture. Back in 2017, I did a lot of stuff on what was at the time called the “alt-right,” but which has now increasingly become the Republican Party. So I guess this is kind of my beat in a way. I remember spending a lot of time online as a teenager, during the Bush administration. At that time, conspiracy theories were everywhere online—mostly about 9/11. But there has been a kind of acceleration of it, and a mainstreaming of it, that happened during the first Trump administration. Most fascinating to me was QAnon, because of just how exotic that particular conspiracy theory got. And also the fact that it played a major role in motivating thousands of people to attempt to overturn an election. I actually regretted not doing a video about QAnon back in 2020. But I thought that by the time 2024 came around, it was still relevant.
**Gillen Tener Martin: This video has gained four million views, reaching beyond even your subscriber base. Whom are you hoping to reach with this video? **
**Natalie Wynn: **I thought about this question a lot while I was working on it. Am I going to try to convince people who are deep in the conspiracy world? Am I trying to convince them to stop it? I decided ‘no, I’m not going to do that.’ I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that you can just reason people out of.
Who I wanted the video to emotionally resonate most with are friends and family of people who have gone down the rabbit hole. I think there is an element of catharsis in hearing someone analyze this thing that has caused a lot of distress in your life. I think millions of Americans and people around the world are in that situation.
Anne Kim: You talk about the patterns that conspiracies have in common. What are the commonalities that you’ve observed in the various conspiracies that have taken hold of our modern politics over the last 20 years?
Natalie Wynn: There are really two types of patterns that I analyze. One is the method of argument, and one is the content of the beliefs. Part of my research for this video was watching a lot of viral conspiracy “documentaries,” I guess you could call them, that have been influential over the last couple of decades. For the 9/11 “truther” movement, there was this video called “Loose Change,” which was viral on YouTube in the late 2000s. I compare it to “Fall of the Cabal,” which was a Facebook-viral documentary that onboarded a lot of people to QAnon beliefs in 2019 and 2020. What I describe as a common style of argument is basically a ‘catalog of “anomalies.”
An anomaly is something that subjectively feels inconsistent or implausible about an official narrative. So for example, a 9/11 “anomaly” would be that a passport of one of the hijackers was found after 9/11 at Ground Zero. How could a passport survive this fire that burned the building down?
The 9/11 conspiracy theories at least approximate something like amassing evidence for a specific conclusion. Whereas with a lot of the QAnon stuff, it’s hard to even suggest what the logic might be. It’s like, “look at these reptile symbols in the architecture of the Vatican.” You mentioned I used to be a philosophy PhD. I dropped out, but I still got as far as logic class. And in logic, there are premises that lead to a conclusion. I would not say that “Fall of the Cabal” is anything close to that.
Instead, I think what they’re doing is creating room for doubt that maybe all the world’s institutions are captured by some kind of radical evil. That I think is emotionally powerful because it makes people feel like they have nowhere to go for good information. They can’t trust the press. They can’t trust doctors. Obviously, the government is corrupt. Obviously, you can’t trust any official historian because they’re all in on it. So that’s uncomfortable, right? Because it’s uncomfortable not to know what kind of world you’re living in. It creates this thirst for knowledge, which the conspiracy documentary that you’re watching then fills in with a bunch of stuff that they haven’t demonstrated with anything resembling evidence. But it fills in the gap that you’ve just created by causing them to question everything else.
For the content, I break it down into three major tendencies that I call dualism, symbolism, and intentionalism. Dualism is black and white moral thinking. People are good or people are evil. And all of the world’s institutions, governments, universities—those have all been captured by radical evil. Whereas, we, the conspiracy researchers and the common people, obviously we’re good.
Intentionalism would be the idea that things happen because someone consciously wills them to happen. So If there is an economic recession, well, that’s not the product of widely dispersed, reckless decision-making. It’s not the product of ordinary human greed compounding at the level of millions of little decisions. It’s instead like, “Someone decided there’s going to be a recession now and they made that happen.” And every single detail unfolds according to plan. So that’s intentionalism.
Symbolism I compare to divination, like reading tea leaves or astrology, where you are using associations with symbols that you attempt to interpret. You can look for the symbols basically anywhere. Government buildings are a good place to start. [So take] again, the Vatican: it has reptile symbols, a snake is associated with Satan, so that means the Vatican is probably satanic. A lot of the activity in the QAnon community online was “decoding.” There are these cryptic messages, and then people go around looking for clues. I think this is closer to divination than it is to the kind of thing that a journalist or historian would do, which I think is also fun for people because journalism and history are kind of tedious, right? It requires you to collect information and to proportion your belief to evidence. Whereas divination is kind of fun because you can follow whatever feels emotionally satisfying to you in the moment. It’s almost like free association.
Gillen Tener Martin: I think it’s common to think about conspiracist thinking as a mainstream phenomenon in the U.S. today, but you trace a big historical arc to the beginnings of the Republic. Can you talk a bit about that long arc of conspiracist thinking?
Natalie Wynn: People talk about this like the internet started it. I do think the internet made it worse, but I don’t think the internet started it. I think the printing press probably was the first thing to make it worse. There was this book by John Robison. He’s a [Scottish] writer on conspiracy theories, and he was the popularizer of the Illuminati conspiracy theory in the 18th century. They thought the Illuminati was a branch of the Freemasons: atheists and anarchists that would cause revolutions and overthrow all the world’s governments and all the world’s religions.
Someone sent a copy of his book to George Washington, and there’s a correspondence where George Washington acknowledges having read the book and he sort of says, “Well, I’ve heard a lot about this. I don’t think the Freemasons of America are involved, but I’ll keep an eye on it.” It’s funny to me considering how “online” Illuminati conspiracy theories feel—the 2010s was a peak of people looking for triangles and eyes everywhere, like in Katy Perry music videos. “My God, it’s the Illuminati!” It’s kind of funny that George Washington was having this conversation with someone.
Anne Kim: Let’s bring things back to the modern day and to Trump. What is it about Trump and conspiracist thinking that has enabled such a close partnership? You could argue that Trump exploits all the tendencies that you’ve talked about in order to leverage and use that thinking to his benefit. There are aspects of Trump that fit into what you’re talking about. He does see the world in very dualistic terms: black and white, us against them. But how did Donald Trump become the totem for conspiracy theorists and conspiracist thinking, to the extent that he has?
Natalie Wynn: I think Trump has always recognized conspiracy thinking as useful, as this underground strain of American politics that is available at any time to be tapped by someone unscrupulous enough to tap it. In 2015, he went on the Alex Jones show “Infowars,” which I don’t think any other presidential candidate, certainly not one running for one of the main two parties, has ever gone on. Because, you know, it’s crackpot. But Trump saw that there were millions of people listening to that, and no politician saw that as a useful voting demographic. He did.
I think that he found it useful especially in 2020. The best way to plot a real conspiracy is to theorize a fictional conspiracy, because the existence of a conspiracy justifies a counter-conspiracy. So if you say that the election has been rigged, and if your followers believe that, then it’s justified to conspire to overturn the election, right? It’s not like this is the first election where people have said that it’s rigged or that it’s a conspiracy. People say it basically every time. But traditionally, American politicians who lose the election concede and they tell their followers, “yes, we accept the results of the election.” And that quells this impulse. But Trump did the opposite. He fanned the flames up until the point of January 6th.
So I think in a very pragmatic way, he finds conspiracy thinking useful. Although things have gotten a little awkward lately as a result of the Epstein situation because the Epstein stuff is a load-bearing pillar of conspiracy thinking in the modern age. I think that a lot of people, and certainly most conspiracy theorists, believe that there is a vast pedophile conspiracy that involves a huge proportion of Hollywood and politicians and so on. I get the sense that Trump has gotten used to the idea that he can just tell his followers, “Yeah, we’re not thinking about that anymore,” and they’ll stop. But this one seems to be a little more difficult. As a big part of QAnon, people are very attached to this, and so it’s a little harder to put a memory hold on this particular thing.
Gillen Tener Martin: It says a lot to me that this has formed one of the most notable cracks in his base so far. And going back to January 6th, I think it can be easy for us now to forget the relationship of conspiracies to that event, but in the video you give a really good overview of how conspiracy both led to and excused an insurrection. Can you talk a bit about the role of QAnon and conspiracism in January 6th?
**Natalie Wynn: **So QAnon always had this element of apocalyptic thinking. The idea was that there was going to be this event called “the Storm”’ where Donald Trump—who they viewed as a messiah figure—was going to purge the deep state of the cabal (cannibals, pedophiles, whatever evil people that had taken hold of it). And there was a growing frustration that this hadn’t happened. What happened is a morphing of the idea “Trump is going to abolish the deep state” to “we are the digital soldiers, we’ve been here all along, the point of this movement was that it was training us to be ready for this moment, and now it’s up to us to join the president in bringing about the Storm.”
Obviously, there were a lot of different groups at January 6th. There [were] also Proud Boys and other people bringing their own agenda to it. But a lot of those who I guess would be considered “ordinary people”—people who were not previously involved in white nationalist gangs, for example, like accountants and grandmothers—who showed up on January 6th were there because of QAnon conspiracy theorizing.
**Anne Kim: Your reference to the accountants and the grandmothers alludes to a point that you make in your video about how almost anyone can be vulnerable to conspiracist thinking. Could you talk a little bit about what makes someone more vulnerable to this kind of thinking in the first place? **
Natalie Wynn: Some of it is pretty universal. Systematic thinking is hard: it’s unintuitive to humans, whereas intentionalist thinking—the idea that things happen as a result of plans manifesting—is more intuitive. But there are things that I think cause specific people to really tend to dive into this. One of the big ones is some sense of humiliation or having this longing to feel important that has been frustrated in other areas of life. This is something I noticed with the most high-profile celebrity conspiracy theorists.
For example, David Icke is most notorious for the reptilian theorizing that he did beginning in the 1990s. But he used to be a sports broadcaster. He announced on a talk show in the early ‘90s that he was the son of God, and he prophesied a coming era of hurricanes and earthquakes and this sort of revolution. And he was mocked, he was laughed at, and was kind of a pariah in the British media. I mean, we can understand why. But I think from his perspective, that was painful and humiliating. And so there’s this desire to be like, “Who did this to me?” And in his case, the answer to that question was reptilians. But I think that it’s something you also see with more recent conspiracy theorists.
Candace Owens, who has really been on a conspiracy tear recently, wasn’t always like this. Back in 2017 or so, she was involved in Black Lives Matter activism. But there was this incident where she created a website called Social Autopsy, which was essentially a revenge doxing website for people who had been harassed. She got very negative feedback for this, and I think the sense of being canceled. She’s talked about this in interviews. She felt like “the media is against me,” and then she heard Trump talking about how the media is lying, and that really resonated because she was under attack by the media. So I think that there’s a sense of humiliation in both those cases.
But it’s also common in the average person who gets into conspiracy theories. A sense of career unfulfillment or estrangement from your kids or just any kind of miscellaneous personal frustration that you have can create a scapegoating impulse. When bad things happen, people want a sort of satanic mastermind that they can blame. And conspiracism offers that.
Gillen Tener Martin: You make a really strong case throughout the video for how conspiracist thinking is not compatible with democracy. Can you lay out why?
Natalie Wynn: So the idea of how democracy ideally is supposed to function is that there is public deliberation about issues and it’s possible for us to negotiate and to reason about things and to make compromises. Conspiracism throws a wrench in the works of all of that because it’s so irrational. I almost want to say a-rational. It’s not really engaging with reason at all. So when you find that you cannot reason with your neighbors—you can’t even have a coherent conversation because you don’t know how to have a coherent conversation with someone who thinks that the pandemic was caused by the Rothschilds—I think it’s a problem for a political system where people need to reach at least some baseline of consensus about what reality is.
There’s a wide spectrum of opinion, much of it I would disagree with, but which I would still consider to be within the realm of things that can be argued about. Whereas the idea that the Judeo-Bolshevik-Vatican-Freemasons are controlling the White House through reptilian moon radars or whatever … I don’t know how to talk about that because it’s so not grounded in reality that discourse itself fails. And that scares me.