most people—including him, until now—looked at QAnon adherents en masse as certifiably insane. It was a temptingly simple explanation for a deeply complex phenomenon. Media coverage was partly responsible for this unevidenced perception: It tended to spotlight QAnon’s most gobsmacking beliefs, leaving people mystified as to how any sane individual could fall for something so crazy. But that obscured the process. Believers weren’t drawn to QAnon through lurid tales of cannibalism, infanticide, or satanic sex abuse rituals. They started out consuming lighter, more digestible conspiracy theory
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