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    QAnon Candidates Aren’t Thriving, but Some of Their Ideas Are

    PRESCOTT, Ariz. — Pamphlets, buttons and American flags cluttered booth after booth for political candidates at a conference center in Prescott, Ariz., this month. But the table for Ron Watkins, a Republican candidate for Congress who rose to fame for his ties to the QAnon conspiracy theory, sat empty.“I thought it started at 11:30,” said Orlando Munguia, Mr. Watkins’s campaign manager, who arrived about 30 minutes after the event had begun and hastily laid out campaign materials without the candidate in tow.Mr. Watkins, a computer programmer in his 30s, is running into the same reality that many other QAnon-linked candidates have confronted: Having ties to the conspiracy theory does not automatically translate to a successful political campaign.More established Republican rivals have vastly outraised Mr. Watkins in Arizona’s Second District. Two other congressional candidates in Arizona who have shown some level of support for QAnon also trail their competitors in fund-raising ahead of the Aug. 2 primary. A fourth Arizona candidate with QAnon ties has suspended his House campaign. The same trend is playing out nationally.Primary results for QAnon-linked candidates More

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    How Lawyer William Olson Pitched Trump on a 2020 Election Plot

    The role of William J. Olson in advising the president in late 2020, which has not previously been disclosed, shows how fringe figures were influencing him at a critical time.Around 5 in the afternoon on Christmas Day in 2020, as many Americans were celebrating with family, President Donald J. Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Fla., on the phone with a little-known conservative lawyer who was encouraging his attempts to overturn the election, according to a memo the lawyer later wrote documenting the call.The lawyer, William J. Olson, was promoting several extreme ideas to the president that Mr. Olson later conceded could be regarded as tantamount to declaring “martial law” and could even invite comparisons with Watergate. They included tampering with the Justice Department and firing the acting attorney general, according to the Dec. 28 memo by Mr. Olson, titled “Preserving Constitutional Order,” describing their discussions.“Our little band of lawyers is working on a memorandum that explains exactly what you can do,” Mr. Olson wrote in his memo, obtained by The New York Times, which he marked “privileged and confidential” and sent to the president. “The media will call this martial law,” he wrote, adding that “that is ‘fake news.’”The document highlights the previously unreported role of Mr. Olson in advising Mr. Trump as the president was increasingly turning to extreme, far-right figures outside the White House to pursue options that many of his official advisers had told him were impossible or unlawful, in an effort to cling to power.The involvement of a person like Mr. Olson, who now represents the conspiracy theorist and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, underscores how the system that would normally insulate a president from rogue actors operating outside of official channels had broken down within weeks after the 2020 election.Read William J. Olson’s Memo to TrumpA memorandum sent in December 2020 to President Donald J. Trump by the right-wing lawyer William J. Olson on how to seek to overturn the election.Read DocumentThat left Mr. Trump in direct contact with people who promoted conspiracy theories or questionable legal ideas, telling him not only what he wanted to hear, but also that they — not the public servants advising him — were the only ones he could trust.“In our long conversation earlier this week, I could hear the shameful and dismissive attitude of the lawyer from White House Counsel’s Office toward you personally — but more importantly toward the Office of the President of the United States itself,” Mr. Olson wrote to Mr. Trump. “This is unacceptable.”The memo was written 10 days after one of the most dramatic meetings ever held in the Trump White House, during which three of the president’s White House advisers vied — at one point almost physically — with outside actors to influence Mr. Trump. In that meeting, the lawyer Sidney Powell and Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, pushed for Mr. Trump to seize voting machines and appoint Ms. Powell special counsel to investigate wild and groundless claims of voter fraud, even as White House lawyers fought back.But the memo suggests that, even after his aides had won that skirmish in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump continued to seek extreme legal advice that ran counter to the recommendations of the Justice Department and the counsel’s office.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 8Making a case against Trump. More

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    The Fight Over Truth Also Has a Red State-Blue State Divide

    Several states run by Democrats are pushing for stiffer rules on the spread of false information, while Republican-run states are pushing for fewer rules.To fight disinformation, California lawmakers are advancing a bill that would force social media companies to divulge their process for removing false, hateful or extremist material from their platforms. Texas lawmakers, by contrast, want to ban the largest of the companies — Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — from removing posts because of political points of view.In Washington, the state attorney general persuaded a court to fine a nonprofit and its lawyer $28,000 for filing a baseless legal challenge to the 2020 governor’s race. In Alabama, lawmakers want to allow people to seek financial damages from social media platforms that shut down their accounts for having posted false content.In the absence of significant action on disinformation at the federal level, officials in state after state are taking aim at the sources of disinformation and the platforms that propagate them — only they are doing so from starkly divergent ideological positions. In this deeply polarized era, even the fight for truth breaks along partisan lines.The result has been a cacophony of state bills and legal maneuvers that could reinforce information bubbles in a nation increasingly divided over a variety of issues — including abortion, guns, the environment — and along geographic lines.The midterm elections in November are driving much of the activity on the state level. In red states, the focus has been on protecting conservative voices on social media, including those spreading baseless claims of widespread electoral fraud.In blue states, lawmakers have tried to force the same companies to do more to stop the spread of conspiracy theories and other harmful information about a broad range of topics, including voting rights and Covid-19.“We should not stand by and just throw up our hands and say that this is an impossible beast that is just going to take over our democracy,” Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, a Democrat, said in an interview.Calling disinformation a “nuclear weapon” threatening the country’s democratic foundations, he supports legislation that would make it a crime to spread lies about elections. He praised the $28,000 fine levied against the advocacy group that challenged the integrity of the state’s vote in 2020.“We ought to be creatively looking for potential ways to reduce its impact,” he said, referring to disinformation.The biggest hurdle to new regulations — regardless of the party pushing them — is the First Amendment. Lobbyists for the social media companies say that, while they seek to moderate content, the government should not be in the business of dictating how that’s done.Concerns over free speech defeated a bill in deeply blue Washington that would have made it a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail, for candidates or elected officials “to spread lies about free and fair elections when it has the likelihood to stoke violence.”Governor Inslee, who faced baseless claims of election fraud after he won a third term in 2020, supported the legislation, citing the Supreme Court’s 1969 ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio. That ruling allowed states to punish speech calling for violence or criminal acts when “such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”The legislation stalled in the state’s Senate in February, but Mr. Inslee said the scale of the problem required urgent action.Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat from Washington State, faced baseless claims of election fraud after he won a third term in 2020.Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesThe scope of the problem of disinformation, and of the power of the tech companies, has begun to chip away at the notion that free speech is politically untouchable.The new law in Texas has already reached the Supreme Court, which blocked the law from taking effect in May, though it sent the case back to a federal appeals court for further consideration. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed the legislation last year, prompted in part by the decisions by Facebook and Twitter to shut down the accounts of former President Donald J. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, violence on Capitol Hill.The court’s ruling signaled that it could revisit one core issue: whether social media platforms, like newspapers, retain a high degree of editorial freedom.“It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a dissent to the court’s emergency ruling suspending the law’s enforcement.A federal judge last month blocked a similar law in Florida that would have fined social media companies as much as $250,000 a day if they blocked political candidates from their platforms, which have become essential tools of modern campaigning. Other states with Republican-controlled legislatures have proposed similar measures, including Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa and Alaska.Alabama’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, has created an online portal through which residents can complain that their access to social media has been restricted: alabamaag.gov/Censored. In a written response to questions, he said that social media platforms stepped up efforts to restrict content during the pandemic and the presidential election of 2020.“During this period (and continuing to present day), social media platforms abandoned all pretense of promoting free speech — a principle on which they sold themselves to users — and openly and arrogantly proclaimed themselves the Ministry of Truth,” he wrote. “Suddenly, any viewpoint that deviated in the slightest from the prevailing orthodoxy was censored.”Much of the activity on the state level today has been animated by the fraudulent assertion that Mr. Trump, and not President Biden, won the 2020 presidential election. Although disproved repeatedly, the claim has been cited by Republicans to introduce dozens of bills that would clamp down on absentee or mail-in voting in the states they control.Democrats have moved in the opposite direction. Sixteen states have expanded the abilities of people to vote, which has intensified pre-emptive accusations among conservative lawmakers and commentators that the Democrats are bent on cheating.“There is a direct line from conspiracy theories to lawsuits to legislation in states,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan election advocacy organization at the New York University School of Law. “Now, more than ever, your voting rights depend on where you live. What we’ve seen this year is half the country going in one direction and the other half going the other direction.”TechNet, the internet company lobbying group, has fought local proposals in dozens of states. The industry’s executives argue that variations in state legislation create a confusing patchwork of rules for companies and consumers. Instead, companies have highlighted their own enforcement of disinformation and other harmful content.“These decisions are made as consistently as possible,” said David Edmonson, the group’s vice president for state policy and government relations.For many politicians the issue has become a powerful cudgel against opponents, with each side accusing the other of spreading lies, and both groups criticizing the social media giants. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has raised campaign funds off his vow to press ahead with his fight against what he has called the “authoritarian companies” that have sought to mute conservative voices. In Ohio, J.D. Vance, the memoirist and Republican nominee for Senate, railed against social media giants, saying they stifled news about the foreign business dealings of Hunter Biden, the president’s son.In Missouri, Vicky Hartzler, a former congresswoman running for the Republican nomination for Senate, released a television ad criticizing Twitter for suspending her personal account after she posted remarks about transgender athletes. “They want to cancel you,” she said in the ad, defending her remarks as “what God intended.”OnMessage, a polling firm that counts the National Republican Senatorial Committee as a client, reported that 80 percent of primary voters surveyed in 2021 said they believed that technology companies were too powerful and needed to be held accountable. Six years earlier, only 20 percent said so. “Voters have a palpable fear of cancel culture and how tech is censoring political views.” said Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Florida Republican, has raised campaign funds off his vow to press ahead with his fight against what he has called “authoritarian companies.”Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesIn blue states, Democrats have focused more directly on the harm disinformation inflicts on society, including through false claims about elections or Covid and through racist or antisemitic material that has motivated violent attacks like the massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo in May.Connecticut plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing to share factual information about voting and to create a position for an expert to root out misinformation narratives about voting before they go viral. A similar effort to create a disinformation board at the Department of Homeland Security provoked a political fury before its work was suspended in May pending an internal review.In California, the State Senate is moving forward with legislation that would require social media companies to disclose their policies regarding hate speech, disinformation, extremism, harassment and foreign political interference. (The legislation would not compel them to restrict content.) Another bill would allow civil lawsuits against large social media platforms like TikTok and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram if their products were proven to have addicted children.“All of these different challenges that we’re facing have a common thread, and the common thread is the power of social media to amplify really problematic content,” said Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel of California, a Democrat, who sponsored the legislation to require greater transparency from social media platforms. “That has significant consequences both online and in physical spaces.”It seems unlikely that the flurry of legislative activity will have a significant impact before this fall’s elections; social media companies will have no single response acceptable to both sides when accusations of disinformation inevitably arise.“Any election cycle brings intense new content challenges for platforms, but the November midterms seem likely to be particularly explosive,” said Matt Perault, a director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina. “With abortion, guns, democratic participation at the forefront of voters’ minds, platforms will face intense challenges in moderating speech. It’s likely that neither side will be satisfied by the decisions platforms make.” More

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    On Conservative Radio, Misleading Message Is Clear: ‘Democrats Cheat’

    Election fraud claims from 2020 are widespread on talk radio, contributing to the belief that the midterm results cannot be trusted.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.November’s midterm elections are still months away, but to many conservative commentators, the fix is already in. Democrats have cheated before, they say, and they will cheat again.Never mind that the claims are false.In Lafayette, La., Carol Ross, host of “The Ross Report,” questioned how Democrats could win a presidential election again after a tumultuous few years in power. “They’re going to have to cheat again,” she said. “You know that. There will be rampant cheating.”In Greenville, S.C., Charlie James, a host on 106.3 WORD, read from a blog post arguing that “the Democrats are going to lose a majority during the midterm elections unless they’re able to cheat in a massive wide-scale way.”And on WJFN in Virginia, Stephen K. Bannon, the erstwhile adviser to former President Donald J. Trump who was indicted for refusing to comply with subpoenas issued by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, summed it up this way: “If Democrats don’t cheat, they don’t win.”Mr. Trump introduced the nation to a flurry of false claims about widespread voter fraud after his electoral loss in 2020. The extent of his efforts has been outlined extensively in the past couple of weeks during the hearings on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — including a speech that day in which he falsely said Democrats changed voting laws “because they want to cheat.”Republican politicians and cable outlets like Fox News have carried the torch for Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories ever since. But the loudest and most consistent booster of these unfounded claims has been talk radio, where conservative hosts reduce the jumble of false voter fraud theories into a two-word mantra: “Democrats cheat.” More

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    Why Conspiracy Theories Flourish in Trump’s America

    Whether he is out of power or in office, Donald Trump deploys conspiracy theory as a political mobilizing tool designed to capture anger at the liberal establishment, to legitimize racial resentment and to unite voters who feel oppressed by what they see as a dominant socially progressive culture.The success of this strategy is demonstrated by the astonishing number of Republicans — a decisive majority, according to a recent Economist/YouGov survey — who say that they believe that the Democratic Party and its elected officials conspired to steal the 2020 election. This is a certifiable conspiracy theory, defined as a belief in “a secret arrangement by a group of powerful people to usurp political or economic power, violate established rights, hoard vital secrets, or unlawfully alter government institutions.”Not only do something like 71 percent of Republicans — roughly 52 million voters, according to a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll released on Jan. 6, 2022 — claim to believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election despite indisputable evidence to the contrary, but the Republican Party has committed itself unequivocally and relentlessly to promoting this false claim.The delusion is evident in the Republican candidates who won primaries for governor, U.S. Senate, U.S. House and other statewide posts in elections conducted in 18 states during the first five months of this year.“District by district voters in places that cast ballots through the end of May have chosen at least 108 candidates for statewide office or for Congress — Republican candidates who have repeated Trump’s lies,” Amy Gardner and Isaac Arnsdorf reported last week in The Washington Post.Consider Texas. On the campaign trail this year, the Republican nominees for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general and 24 of the state’s congressional districts endorsed Trump’s claim that “the 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen.”On June 18, the 5,000 delegates to the Texas Republican Party convention adopted a platform declaring, “We reject the certified results of the 2020 presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States.”The stolen election conspiracy theory has, in effect, become the adhesive holding the dominant Trump wing of the party in lock-step. This particular conspiracy theory joins the network of sub-theories that unite Trump loyalists, who allege that an alliance of Democratic elites and urban political machines have secretly joined forces to deny the will of the people, corralling the votes of illegal immigrants and the dead, while votes cast by Trump supporters are tossed into the trash.In a 2017 essay, “How conspiracy theories helped power Trump’s disruptive politics,” Joseph Uscinski, of the University of Miami, Matthew D. Atkinson of Miami University and Darin DeWitt of California State University, Long Beach, recognized the central role of conspiracy theories in Trump’s rise to the presidency.In the 2016 primaries, “Trump, as a disruptive candidate, could not compete on the party establishment’s playing field,” they write. “Trump’s solution is what we call ‘conspiracy theory politics.’”Trump’s conspiratorial rhetoric, they continue,boiled down to a single unifying claim: Political elites have abandoned the interests of regular Americans in favor of foreign interests. For Trump, the political system was corrupt and the establishment could not be trusted. It followed, then, that only a disrupter could stop the corruption.A recent paper, “Authoritarian Leaders Share Conspiracy Theories to Attack Opponents, Galvanize Followers, Shift Blame, and Undermine Democratic Institutions” by Zhiying (Bella) Ren, Andrew Carton, Eugen Dimant and Maurice Schweitzer of the University of Pennsylvania, describes the methods political leaders use to gain power by capitalizing on conspiracy theories: “Leaders share conspiracy theories in service of four primary, self-serving goals: to attack opponents, galvanize followers, shift blame and responsibility, and undermine institutions that threaten their power.”Such leaders, the four authors write,often spread conspiracy theories to direct the attention, emotion, and energy of followers toward a common enemy who threatens their interests, thereby galvanizing followers. Toward this end, many conspiracy theories depict a nefarious perpetrator engaging in covert activities to harm the welfare of followers.They continue:Systems such as open elections and the free press can safeguard democracy by illuminating corrupt behavior and ensuring the peaceful transition of power. Leaders may use conspiracy theories to undermine the credibility, legitimacy, and authority of these institutions, however, if they threaten their power.Politicians who adopt conspiratorial strategies, Ren and colleagues write,find this to be an especially effective tactic if their own claim to power is illegitimate or controversial. Moreover, since the exposure to conspiracy theories reduces followers’ confidence in democratic institutions, leaders may even mobilize followers to engage in violent actions that further undermine these institutions (e.g., disputing an election defeat by initiating riots or mobilizing military forces).In a September 2021 paper, “Social Motives for Sharing Conspiracy Theories,” Ren, Dimant and Schweitzer argue that in promulgating conspiracy theories on social media, many people “knowingly share misinformation to advance social motives.”When deliberately disseminating misinformation, the authors write,people make calculated trade-offs between sharing accurate information and sharing information that generates more social engagement. Even though people know that factual news is more accurate than conspiracy theories, they expect sharing conspiracy theories to generate more social feedback (i.e. comments and “likes”) than sharing factual news.Ren, Dimant and Schweitzer add that “more positive social feedback for sharing conspiracy theories significantly increases people’s tendency to share these conspiracy theories that they do not believe in.”Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, noted that spreading a lie can serve as a shibboleth — something like a password used by one set of people to identify other people as members of a particular group — providing an effective means of signaling the strength of one’s commitment to fellow ideologues:Many who study religion have noted that it’s the very impossibility of a claim that makes it a good signal of one’s commitment to the faith. You don’t need faith to believe obvious things. Proclaiming that the election was stolen surely does play an identity-advertising role in today’s America.Joanne Miller, a political scientist at the University of Delaware, wrote by email that she and two colleagues, Christina Farhart and Kyle Saunders, are about to publish a research paper, “Losers’ Conspiracy: Elections and Conspiratorial Thinking.” They found that “Democrats scored higher in conspiratorial thinking than Republicans after the 2016 election, and Republicans scored higher in conspiratorial thinking after the 2020 election.”One factor contributing to the persistent Republican embrace of conspiracy thinking, Miller continued, is that Trump loyalists in 2020 — who had suddenly become political losers — abruptly understood themselves to be on “a downward trajectory.” Miller writes that “perceiving oneself to be ‘losing’ (culturally, politically, economically, etc.) is likely one of the reasons people are susceptible to belief in conspiracy theories.”Haidt added another dimension to Miller’s argument:I don’t think there’s anything about the conservative mind that makes it more prone to conspiracies. But in the world we live in, the elites who run our cultural, medical and epistemic institutions — and particularly journalism and the universities — are overwhelmingly on the left, so of course Democrats are going to be more trusting of elite pronouncements, while Republicans are more likely to begin from a position of distrust.Are there partisan differences in connection with conspiracy thinking?Uscinski argues that in his view there is little difference in the susceptibility of Democrats and Republicans to conspiracy thinking, but:The issue here isn’t about conspiracy theories so much. These ideas are always out there. The issue is about Donald Trump. The numbers are so high because Trump and his allies inside and outside of government endorsed these election fraud conspiracy theories. Trump, his many advisers and staff, Republican members of Congress, Republican governors and state legislators, conservative media outlets, and right-wing opinion leaders asserted repeatedly that the 2020 election would be and then had been stolen.This has a lot more to do, Uscinski contended, “with the power of political and media elites to affect their followers’ beliefs than anything else.”John Jost, a professor of psychology, politics and data science at N.Y.U., strongly disagrees with Uscinski, arguing that there are major differences between Democrats and Republicans on measures of conspiratorial thinking.Jost wrote by email:My colleagues and I found, in a nationally representative sample of Americans, that there was a .27 correlation (which is quite sizable by the standards of social science) between conservative identification and scores on a scale of generalized conspiratorial mentality.In a separate study, Jost continued:We observed a smaller but clearly significant correlation of .11 between conservative identification and a clinical measure of paranoid ideation, which includes items such as “I often feel that strangers are looking at me critically.” Furthermore, we found that paranoid ideation was a significant mediator of the association between conservative identification and general conspiratorial mind-sets.Jost pointed to a January 2022 article — “Conspiracy mentality and political orientation across 26 countries,” by Roland Imhoff, a professor of psychology at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, and 39 co-authors — that examined the strength of the “conspiracy mentality” at the extremes of left and right based on a sample of 104,253 people in 26 countries, not including the United States.Among their findings:While there was a clear positive relation suggestive of greater conspiracy mentality at the political right in countries spanning the center — north of Europe such as Austria, Belgium (particularly Flanders), France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden, the conspiracy mentality was more pronounced on the left in countries spanning the center-south of Europe such as Hungary, Romania and Spain.But it’s not only that:Taken together, supporters of political parties that are judged as extreme on either end of the political spectrum in general terms have increased conspiracy mentality. Focusing on the position of parties on the dimension of democratic values and freedom, the link with conspiracy mentality is linear, with higher conspiracy mentality among supporters of authoritarian right-wing parties. Thus, supporters of extreme right-wing parties seem to have a consistently higher conspiracy mentality, whereas the same only counts for extreme left-wing parties of a more authoritarian makeup and with less focus on ecological and liberal values.In a March 2019 paper, “Understanding Conspiracy Theories,” Karen M. Douglas, a psychologist at the University of Kent, writing with Uscinski and six other scholars, conducted a wide-ranging study of conspiratorial thinking. They found that “conspiracy beliefs are correlated with alienation from the political system and anomie — a feeling of personal unrest and lack of understanding of the social world. Belief in conspiracy theories is also associated with a belief that the economy is getting worse.”In addition, Douglas and her colleagues contend that “a conviction that others conspire against one’s group is more likely to emerge when the group thinks of itself as undervalued, underprivileged, or under threat.”Studies in the United States of “the social characteristics of those prone to conspiracy theories,” the authors note, show that “higher levels of conspiracy thinking correlate with lower levels of education and lower levels of income.” Another study they cite found that “conspiracy believers were more likely to be male, unmarried, less educated, have lower income, be unemployed, be a member of an ethnic minority group, and have weaker social networks.”Importantly, the Douglas paper points to studies showing that “conspiracy belief has been linked to violent intentions.” One of those studies, by Uscinski, writing with Joseph M. Parent of Notre Dame,showed that those who were more generally inclined toward conspiracy theories were more likely to agree that “violence is sometimes an acceptable way to express disagreement with the government.” Those inclined toward conspiracy belief are also in favor of lax gun ownership laws, show a willingness to conspire themselves and show greater intentions to engage in everyday crime.Douglas, Daniel Jolley of the University of Nottingham, Tanya Schrader of Staffordshire University and Ana C. Leite of Durham University demonstrate a linkage between conspiracy thinking and everyday crime: “Such crimes can include running red lights, paying cash for items to avoid paying taxes, or failing to disclose faults in secondhand items for sale” — in their 2019 paper, “Belief in conspiracy theories and intentions to engage in everyday crime.”In a series of experiments, Jolley and his colleagues found that “belief in conspiracy theories was significantly positively correlated with everyday crime behaviors. Criminal behaviors were also negatively associated with Honesty-Humility, Agreeableness-Anger, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience and Moral Identity.”The authors suggested that “engaging in everyday crime may be empowering for people who perceive that the world is full of conspiring powerful elites who ought to be challenged.”A related question facing the country going into the 2022 midterms and, more important, the 2024 presidential election is whether the contagion of conspiratorial thinking will increase the likelihood of violence before, during and after the election.In another paper, “The complex relationship between conspiracy belief and the politics of social change,” Christopher M. Federico, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, makes a key point: “Conspiratorial ideation about secret plots among the powerful is associated with decreased intention to engage in normative political action (e.g., voting, legal demonstrations) and increased intention to engage in nonnormative political action (e.g., violence, spreading misinformation).”Since conspiratorial thinking, Federico continued, “is associated with extremist intentions and willingness to engage in aggressive, nonnormative political action, it may allow individuals whose politics otherwise incline them to support the status quo to violently resist established authority in the name of imposing their own ideal social order.”Along similar lines, Jan-Willem van Prooijen, a psychologist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, argues in his forthcoming essay, “Psychological benefits of believing conspiracy theories,” that “conspiracy theories help perceivers mentally reconstrue unhealthy behaviors as healthy, and anti-government violence as legitimate (e.g., justifying violent protests as legitimate resistance against oppressors).”In October 2021, Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, published “The Rise of Political Violence in the United States.”Kleinfeld argues:Ideas that were once confined to fringe groups now appear in the mainstream media. White-supremacist ideas, militia fashion, and conspiracy theories spread via gaming websites, YouTube channels, and blogs, while a slippery language of memes, slang, and jokes blurs the line between posturing and provoking violence, normalizing radical ideologies and activities.While violent incidents from the left are on the rise, Kleinfeld continued,political violence still comes overwhelmingly from the right, whether one looks at the Global Terrorism Database, F.B.I. statistics, or other government or independent counts. Yet people committing far-right violence — particularly planned violence rather than spontaneous hate crimes — are older and more established than typical terrorists and violent criminals. They often hold jobs, are married, and have children. Those who attend church or belong to community groups are more likely to hold violent, conspiratorial beliefs. These are not isolated “lone wolves”; they are part of a broad community that echoes their ideas.Perhaps the most telling aspect of Kleinfeld’s essay is a chart based on statistics collected in the Global Terrorism Database that shows a surge in far-right terrorist incidents in the United States, starting in 2015 — when Trump first entered the political arena — rising to great heights by 2019, outstripping terrorist incidents linked to the far left, to religious groups or to environmentalists.What will come of all this?Parent made a good point by email: “This is tricky: Trump has been a conspiracy theorist since forever and he was only briefly a successful politician.” As The Times put it in 2016, “Donald Trump Clung to ‘Birther’ Lie for Years.”Parent continued:What’s freakishly destabilizing about the present is that ideological glues have never been so designed to eviscerate democracy and promote violence. Previous leaders always had the option to go down that road, but chose not to. Now the inmates are running the asylum.Matthew Baum, a professor of public policy at Harvard, put it another way in his email:We had a sitting president declare that an election outcome was illegitimate. This is historically unprecedented. Trump’s assertion is extremely influential to voters who look to him as the leader of the Republican Party in general, and as the leader of the MAGA movement in particular. These factors have combined to allow this particular story to metastasize to a greater extent than most other political conspiracy stories in recent history.Can the country return to the status quo ante?“It is too soon to say,” Baum writes, “whether this delegitimization is permanent. There is certainly a risk that once the genie is out of the bottle — that is, election losers are no longer willing to accept losing as a legitimate outcome and ‘live to fight another day’ — it will be hard to put it back.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Best- and Worst-Case Outcomes of the Jan. 6 Public Hearings

    On Thursday, a bipartisan House select committee will begin public hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. The weeks ahead will be awash with news as the committee reveals what happened in the days and weeks before the attack — and to what extent the rioters were emboldened, or enabled, by the White House and Republican lawmakers.To wade through the news and help us understand what to pay attention to as the hearings unfold, host Jane Coaston calls upon two experts on the Republican Party.[You can listen to this episode of “The Argument” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]Nicole Hemmer is an author and historian of conservative media. Ross Douthat is a Times Opinion columnist. They give their takes on what narratives might play out in the hearings and comment on the danger of far-right extremism in the G.O.P. “I don’t see an incentive structure that pulls the Republican Party in general away from procedural extremism, or even really at the moment, anything that pulls them back to a majoritarian democratic process,” Hemmer says.Mentioned in this episode:“What Oprah Winfrey Knows About American History That Tucker Carlson Doesn’t” by Nicole Hemmer in The New York Times“Are We Witnessing the Mainstreaming of White Power in America?” episode from The Ezra Klein Show“Why Would John Eastman Want to Overturn an Election for Trump?” by Ross Douthat in The New York Times(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Samuel Corum/Getty ImagesThoughts? Email us at argument@nytimes.com or leave us a voice mail message at (347) 915-4324. We want to hear what you’re arguing about with your family, your friends and your frenemies. (We may use excerpts from your message in a future episode.)By leaving us a message, you are agreeing to be governed by our reader submission terms and agreeing that we may use and allow others to use your name, voice and message.“The Argument” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Elisa Gutierrez and Vishakha Darbha. Edited by Alison Bruzek and Anabel Bacon. With original music by Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta with editorial support from Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. More

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    Lawyer Who Plotted to Overturn Trump Loss Recruits Election Deniers to Watch Over the Vote

    A central figure in the scheme to reverse the 2020 election is mobilizing grass-roots activists into an “army of citizens” trained to aggressively monitor elections.In a hotel conference center outside Harrisburg, Pa., Cleta Mitchell, one of the key figures in a failed scheme to overturn Donald J. Trump’s defeat, was leading a seminar on “election integrity.”“We are taking the lessons we learned in 2020 and we are going forward to make sure they never happen again,” Ms. Mitchell told the crowd of about 150 activists-in-training.She would be “putting you to work,” she told them.In the days after the 2020 election, Ms. Mitchell was among a cadre of Republican lawyers who frantically compiled unsubstantiated accusations, debunked claims and an array of confusing and inconclusive eyewitness reports to build the case that the election was marred by fraud. Courts rejected the cases and election officials were unconvinced, thwarting a stunning assault on the transfer of power.Now Ms. Mitchell is prepping for the next election. Working with a well-funded network of organizations on the right, including the Republican National Committee, she is recruiting election conspiracists into an organized cavalry of activists monitoring elections.In seminars around the country, Ms. Mitchell is marshaling volunteers to stake out election offices, file information requests, monitor voting, work at polling places and keep detailed records of their work. She has tapped into a network of grass-root groups that promote misinformation and espouse wild theories about the 2020 election, including the fiction that President Biden’s victory could still be decertified and Mr. Trump reinstated.One concern is the group’s intent to research the backgrounds of local and state officials to determine whether each is a “friend or foe” of the movement. Many officials already feel under attack by those who falsely contend that the 2020 election was stolen.An extensive review of Ms. Mitchell’s effort, including documents and social media posts, interviews and attendance at the Harrisburg seminar, reveals a loose network of influential groups and fringe figures. They include election deniers as well as mainstream organizations such as the Heritage Foundation’s political affiliate, Tea Party Patriots and the R.N.C., which has participated in Ms. Mitchell’s seminars. The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, is a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a right-wing think tank with close ties and financial backing from Mr. Trump’s political operation.Ms. Mitchell says she is creating “a volunteer army of citizens” who can counter what she describes as Democratic bias in election offices.“We’re going to be watching. We’re going to take back our elections,” she said in an April interview with John Fredericks, a conservative radio host. “The only way they win is to cheat,” she added.The claim that Mr. Trump lost the election because of improper conduct in election offices or rampant voter fraud is false. Mr. Trump’s defeat was undisputed among election officials and certified by Democrats and Republicans, with many recounts and audits verifying the outcome. Mr. Trump’s Justice Department found no evidence of widespread fraud. Mr. Trump lost more than 50 of his postelection challenges in court.Campaigns, parties and outside groups from both sides of the political spectrum regularly form poll-monitoring operations and recruit poll workers. And Republicans have in the past boasted of plans to build an “army” of observers, raising fears about widespread voter intimidation and conflict at the polls that largely have not materialized.Some former election officials say they are hopeful that when election skeptics observe the process they may finally be convinced that the system is sound. But several who examined Ms. Mitchell’s training materials and statements at the request of The New York Times sounded alarms about her tactics.Ms. Mitchell’s trainings promote particularly aggressive methods — with a focus on surveillance — that appear intended to feed on activists’ distrust and create pressure on local officials, rather than ensure voters’ access to the ballot, they say. A test drive of the strategy in the Virginia governor’s race last year highlighted how quickly the work — when conducted by people convinced of falsehoods about fraud — can disrupt the process and spiral into bogus claims, even in a race Republicans won.“I think it’s going to come down to whether they are truly interested in knowing the truth about elections or they’re interested in propagating propaganda,” said Al Schmidt, a Republican and former city commissioner of Philadelphia who served on the elections board.Asked about her project at the Pennsylvania training, Ms. Mitchell declined an interview request and asked a reporter to leave.In a statement emailed later, she said: “The American election system envisions citizen engagement and we are training people to assume the roles outlined in the statutes.”Ms. Mitchell’s operation sits at a tension point for her party. While the establishment is eager to take advantage of the base’s energy and outrage over 2020, some are wary of being associated with — or held accountable for — some of the more extreme people in the movement. The feeling is mutual among activists, many of whom believe the R.N.C. did not do enough to back Mr. Trump’s challenge.The Republican National Committee’s involvement is part of a return to widespread election-work organizing. For nearly 30 years, the committee was limited in some operations by a consent decree after Democrats accused party officials in New Jersey of hiring off-duty police officers and posting signs intended to scare Black and Latino people away from voting. The committee was freed of restrictions in 2018.This year, its multimillion-dollar investment includes hiring 18 state “election integrity” directors and 19 state “election integrity” lawyers. The party has so far recruited more than 5,000 poll watchers and nearly 12,000 poll workers, according to the committee. These efforts are separate from the Election Integrity Network, said Emma Vaughn, an R.N.C. spokeswoman.But in multiple states, the R.N.C. election integrity directors have been involved in Ms. Mitchell’s events. Ms. Vaughn acknowledged that party officials participate in events hosted by other groups to recruit poll workers and poll watchers. She noted that in many states poll monitors must be authorized by the party. The R.N.C. is training its monitors to comply with laws protecting voting rights, she said.“The R.N.C. works with other groups who have an interest in promoting election integrity, but the party’s efforts are independent from any outside organization,” Ms. Vaughn said.Harnessing the EnergySince 2020, scores of local groups have popped up around the country to promote claims about the election. Many are run by activists with little experience in politics or elections but who have amassed sizable membership lists and social media followers. They are spurred on by national figures touring the circuit and spreading false claims.Ms. Mitchell stepped in to harness that energy.The 71-year-old lawyer has been a steady and influential force in the voting battles. Once a liberal Democrat in Oklahoma, Ms. Mitchell has been a fixture in the conservative movement. She has represented the National Rifle Association and was on the board of the American Conservative Union. She has worked closely with Virginia Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, on organizing through the Council for National Policy, a national coordinating group for conservative leaders.In August 2020, Mr. Trump tapped her to prepare for postelection litigation. She enlisted John Eastman, the lawyer who crafted specious legal theories claiming Vice President Mike Pence could keep Mr. Trump in power. “A movement is stirring,” Ms. Mitchell wrote to Mr. Eastman just two days after Election Day. “But needs constitutional support.”Ms. Mitchell helped the president argue his case to state officials. She was on the phone with Mr. Trump when he asked Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find 11,780 votes” that could reverse Mr. Trump’s defeat there.Her latest effort is organized through the Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit organization where she serves as a senior legal fellow and where Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final White House chief of staff, is a senior partner. Mr. Trump’s political action committee, Save America PAC, donated $1 million to the group last year.Ms. Mitchell has described herself as a key conduit between activists and Republican Party leadership.“We are trying to bridge the gap between the grassroots and some of the issues we’ve had with the party,” she told trainees at the event outside Harrisburg.Ms. Mitchell is no doubt connecting with some of the fringe groups and ideas some in the party once avoided.In Virginia, for example, Ms. Mitchell helped a nonprofit organize a coalition that includes Virginians for America First, a group advocating for hand-counting ballots. It’s a position popular among some of those who believe conspiracy theories about foreign hacking in the 2020 election. The group was funded by Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com executive who is now a major benefactor of the election denial movement.Mark Finchem, a state representative from Arizona, at a MAGA rally at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, Mich., in March.Nic Antaya for The New York TimesIn Michigan, Ms. Mitchell’s group held a training session in May that was sponsored in part by a coalition of grass-roots groups called the Michigan Election Protection Team. The R.N.C.’s state election integrity director brought together the coalition to recruit poll workers. According to its website, the coalition includes LaRouchePAC, a committee dedicated to Lyndon LaRouche, the deceased conspiracy theorist, and Let’s Fix Stuff, an outfit run by a former Republican state senator who has promoted a theory about the 2020 election that Republican Michigan Senate leaders denounced as “indefensible.”The R.N.C. sent both its national and state election integrity directors to Ms. Mitchell’s training near Harrisburg. The state director, Andrea Raffle, had worked alongside Ms. Mitchell for months on the event, one of the speakers told the attendees. Ms. Raffle, as well as an organizer from Heritage Action, would be joining a new coalition of election activists led by Toni Shuppe, a fast-rising state activist, organizers announced.Ms. Shuppe’s group, Audit the Vote PA, has become a leading peddler of misleading data about the election in Pennsylvania. Last year, the group set out to find evidence of fraud by canvassing neighborhoods in search of discrepancies between election results and information collected from residents, a method that election experts dismiss as invalid.Ms. Shuppe has admitted to flaws in her data but stands by the conclusions of her analysis. Earlier this year, she circulated a petition that declared citizens’ right “to throw off such government that intends to keep the truth behind the 2020 election hidden.”Now, Ms. Shuppe is recruiting election activists, using what she learned at Ms. Mitchell’s and other training sessions, she said in an interview. So far, around 200 people have signed up, she said.“Just know that we have a plan,” she wrote the day after the Harrisburg seminar to her 15,000 Telegram subscribers. “We’ll never quit. This must be fixed. There is no going back to sleep. And 2020 still needs decertified.”Election workers in Philadelphia sorting through ballots the day after Election Day in 2020.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York Times‘Is That a Friend or Foe?’Much of Ms. Shuppe’s plan is laid out in “The Citizens Guide to Building an Election Integrity Infrastructure,” a 19-page manual Ms. Mitchell has distributed at trainings and online.The document includes some typical guidelines for poll monitors, but elections experts also noted tactics that aren’t routine. The manual advises activists to “be ever-present” inside elections offices, and to meet with post office officials to observe “every step” of the vote-by-mail process allowed by law. They’re advised to keep careful records, including details on any “encounter that is intended to make you uncomfortable being at the election offices.”They recommend aggressively crowdsourcing the accuracy of the voter rolls by collecting affidavits from residents and mailing letters to try to identify potential “bad addresses.” They advise each group to enlist tech-savvy volunteers who, they suggest, can become expert on the specific software and equipment in each county and “what the vulnerabilities are.”The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 8Numerous inquiries. More

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    The MAGA Formula Is Getting Darker and Darker

    The chilling amalgam of Christian nationalism, white replacement theory and conspiratorial zeal — from QAnon to the “stolen” 2020 election — has attracted a substantial constituency in the United States, thanks in large part to the efforts of Donald Trump and his advisers. By some estimates, adherents of these overlapping movements make up as much as a quarter or even a third of the electorate. Whatever the scale, they are determined to restore what they see as the original racial and religious foundation of America.“While these elements are not new,” Robert Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, wrote by email, “Donald Trump wove them together and brought them out into the open. Indeed, the MAGA formula — the stoking of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment while making nativist appeals to the Christian right — could accurately be described as a white Christian nationalist strategy from the beginning.”I asked Katherine Stewart, the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” how much Christian nationalism and the great replacement theory intersect. “The answer is complex,” Stewart said. “There is definitely a wing of the Christian nationalist movement that overlaps with the Great Replacement theory and demographic paranoia in general.”At the same time, however, she continued, “there are other wings of the movement that depend less on explicitly racialized thinking and whose concerns are centered more on religious and cultural paranoia. Christian nationalism is making significant inroads among some Latino communities, for example, and there the argument is not that a preferred racial group is being replaced but that a preferred religious and cultural value system (with supposed economic implications) is under threat.”Instead of Christian nationalism, Stewart prefers the use of “religious nationalism,” which she describes asa reactionary, authoritarian ideology that centers its grievances on a narrative of lost national greatness and believes in the indispensability of the “right” religion in recovering that lost greatness. This mind-set always involves a narrative of unjust persecution at the hands of alien or “un-American” groups. The specific targets may shift. Some focus their fears on the “homosexual agenda”; others target Americans of color or nonwhite immigrant groups; still others identify the menace with religious minorities such as Muslims, Jews and secular “elites,” or perceived threats against gender hierarchy and sexual order. And of course, many take an all-of-the-above approach.According to some scholars, there are two versions of Christian nationalism, one more threatening to the social order than the other.Ruth Braunstein, a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the author of the 2021 paper “The ‘Right’ History: Religion, Race, and Nostalgic Stories of Christian America,” wrote by email that Christian nationalism can be describedas adherence to a mythical vision of the United States as a “Christian nation” that must be protected and preserved. This mythology has two dimensions: it offers an account of American history that frames the country’s founding as sacred and rooted in Christian (or Judeo-Christian) values; and it defines a “real” or “good” American today as someone committed to these same values.Within that context, Braunstein continued:We can see how the great replacement theory overlaps with Christian nationalism. Both view some specific population as “real” Americans, whether that is defined explicitly as white Christians or in the more vague and coded language of “real” or “native born” or “legacy” Americans. And both frame demographic change as threats to both that population and to the country’s essential character. Finally, although not all flavors of Christian nationalism include a conspiratorial element, some versions share with replacement theory an imagined cabal of nefarious elites — often Jews, communists/socialists, or globalists — who are intentionally promoting racial and/or religious diversity in order to diminish white Christian power.Braunstein distinguishes between two variants of Christian nationalism. One she calls “white Christian nationalism” and the other “colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalism.”The first, according to Braunstein, “explicitly fuses whiteness, Christianity, and Americanness,” leading to the conclusion that “white Christians alone embody the values on which a healthy democracy rests; and as such, white Christians alone are suited to hold positions of social influence and political power.”In contrast, she continued, colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalismeither ignores race or uses colorblind language to describe ideal Americanness. This has become the predominant form of Christian nationalism among mainstream conservatives. And for many conservatives, like members of the Tea Party that I studied for several years, the invocation of colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalism is intended to distinguish them from groups on the racist right.Why have Christian nationalism and replacement theory moved so quickly to center stage? Robert Jones of P.R.R.I. suggested it was “twin shocks to the system” delivered during the first two decades of this century: “the election and re-election of our first Black president and the sea change of no longer being a majority-white Christian nation.” Both of these developments, Jones wrote,happened simultaneously between 2008 and 2016. White Christians went from 54 percent to 47 percent in that period, down to 44 percent today. This set the stage for Trump and the emergence of full-throated white Christian nationalism. Trump exchanged the dog whistle for the megaphone.Racial and ethnic resentment has grown far beyond the political fringes, Jones argued, citing levels of agreement in P.R.R.I. polling with the statement “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Among all voters, according to Jones, 29 percent believe that immigrants are invading our country; among Republicans, it’s 60 percent; among Democrats, 11 percent; among QAnon believers, 65 percent; among white evangelicals, 50 percent; and among white non-college voters, as pollsters put it, 43 percent.Not only that, Jones notes:White Americans who agree that “God has granted America a special role in human history” (a softer measure of Christian nationalism) are more than twice as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (28 percent vs. 11 percent). And White Americans who agree that “God intended America to be a promised land for European Christians” (a harder measure of Christian nationalism) are four times as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (43 percent vs. 10 percent). And white Americans who believe that “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic values” are more than five times as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (45 percent vs. 8 percent).In their January 2022 paper, “Christian Nationalism and Political Violence: Victimhood, Racial Identity, Conspiracy, and Support for the Capitol Attacks,” Miles T. Armaly of the University of Mississippi and David T. Buckley and Adam M. Enders, both of the University of Louisville, argue: “Religious ideologies like Christian nationalism should be associated with support for violence, conditional on several individual characteristics that can be inflamed by elite cues.” Those characteristics are “perceived victimhood, reinforcing racial and religious identities, and support for conspiratorial information sources.”“It’s unlikely that a single orientation or one belief was promoting the type of violent action we witnessed in Buffalo or the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” Enders wrote by email. “It’s a toxic blend of extremist orientations, such as Christian nationalism, racism, some expressions of populism and conspiracism, for example, that edges individuals closer to supporting violence.”Enders went on:Christian nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, are all about identity conflict — who is morally virtuous and more deserving, who’s “normal” and even what it means to be an American. Each of these orientations is also characterized by an extreme disdain or fear of the “other.” One might look to Christianity for deeper ties between the orientations, but I think the reality is that conspiracy-minded individuals, like the accused Buffalo shooter, can find connections between anything. He saw America as a white, heterosexual, Christian country that was becoming less white, heterosexual, and Christian, thereby threatening (his perception of) the American way of life, which was his way of life. But, racism, sexism, etc. do not have any inherent connection to a desire to build a Christian nation-state.In a separate paper, Enders wrote that he and other scholars have found thatconspiracy theories, of which great replacement theory is an example, are oftentimes undergirded by antisocial personality traits, such as the dark triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) and a predisposition toward conflict. If you combine all of these dispositions and traits and dial them up to 10, that’s when you’re most likely to find support for violence, which is correlated with (but not determinative of) behavioral violence.Armaly wrote by email that “between 25-32 percent of white Americans support some Christian nationalist ideas. We use six questions to assess the degree to which one supports Christian nationalist ideals,” including agreement or disagreement with “the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation” and “the success of the United States is part of God’s plan.” Around 32 percent of respondents endorse at least four statements, Armaly wrote, “and 25 percent endorse at least five statements.”Armaly noted that of “the major predictors of support for violence — perceived victimhood, attachment to one’s whiteness, racial animus toward blacks, support for authoritarianism, support for populism, and past or current military service — all, save for military service, are present in the accused Buffalo shooter’s written statement.Buckley wrote by email that6 percent of whites, 11.5 percent of white evangelicals, and 17.7 percent of white weekly church goers fall into the joint top quartile of justification of violence, Christian nationalist beliefs, perceived victimhood, white identity, and support for QAnon. That would represent millions of individuals. It also represents a far greater share of the white American population than surveys find when testing Muslim-American support for terrorism.Christian nationalism, white replacement theory and conspiracy preoccupation overlap, although each has unique characteristics.On May 9, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released an illuminating study, “Immigration Attitudes and Conspiratorial Thinkers,” based on 4,173 interviews with adults age 18 and over, which breaks down some of the components of hard-line thinking on the right.The A.P. and NORC created two categories, “high conspiratorial thinkers” and “low conspiratorial thinkers,” based on agreement or disagreement with four statements:1) events are the product of plots executed in secret, 2) events are directed by a small group of powerful people, 3) (those people) are unknown to voters and 4) (they) control the outcome of big events like wars, recessions, and elections. The top 25 percent were placed in the high conspiracy category and the remaining 75 percent in the low conspiracy category.Comparison of the two categories of conspiratorial thinkers revealed sharp differences, according to the report:Seven times as many high conspiratorial thinkers agree that our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places (85 percent vs. 11 percent) and that big events like wars and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people working in secret (89 percent vs. 13 percent) than their low conspiratorial counterparts. High conspiratorial thinkers believe the people who run the country are not known to the voters at triple the rate of the rest of the general population (94 percent vs. 31 percent), and they are about twice as likely to agree that a few people will always run the country (96 percent vs. 48 percent).Among those ranked high in conspiratorial thinking, 42 percent agreed that there is a group of people trying to replace native-born Americans and that native-born Americans are losing economic, political and cultural influence to immigrants, compared with 8 percent of low conspiracy thinkers.In the case of white replacement theory, the report asked two questions: “There is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views” (agree or disagree), and “How concerned are you that native-born Americans are losing their economic, political, and cultural influence in this country because of the growing population of immigrants?”The survey found significant patterns in cable news choice among those whobelieve in both the questions measuring Replacement Theory. Belief in Replacement Theory is much higher among OANN/Newsmax viewers (45 percent) and Fox News viewers (31 percent) than it is among CNN (13 percent) or MSNBC viewers (11 percent).Who are the people who fall into the high conspiracy theory category? “Nearly 6 in 10 white high conspiratorial thinkers identify as Republicans,” the report says, “and more than half voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.” Based on the racial resentment scale, the survey found that 55 percent of white high conspiratorial thinkers score in the top 25th percentile of racial resentment, compared with 21 percent of white low conspiratorial thinkers.Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma who has written extensively about Christian nationalism with Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at Indiana University, observed in an email that “there is tremendous overlap between Christian nationalism and The Great Replacement theory.”Perry and Whitehead have found:White Americans who affirm Christian nationalist views are quite concerned with whites losing their majority status in the United States. They are also very concerned with low birthrates and believe that we need to return to a day when Americans had more babies. This is related to their fears of immigration and cultural change. White Christian nationalism is also powerfully related with views that true patriots may need to resort to physical violence to save the nation, because they believe the current situation has become so dire.Whitehead elaborated in his own email:Racism is intimately intertwined with white Christian nationalism, and so the great replacement theory is a part of that intersection. We find in study after study that when white Americans strongly embrace Christian nationalism — an ethno-religious political ideology that advocates a close fusion between a particular expression of Christianity and American civic life — they are more likely to (1) fear a time in the future where whites are no longer the majority, (2) oppose interracial marriage, (3) oppose transracial adoption, (4) assume Black Americans are biologically inferior, (5) believe police violence toward Black Americans is warranted, and (6) show more tolerance for “old-fashioned racists” compared to other stigmatized groups.Joseph Baker, a sociologist at East Tennessee State University who together with Perry and Whitehead wrote the paper “Keep America Christian (and White): Christian Nationalism, Fear of Ethnoracial Outsiders, and Intention to Vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election,” noted:Christian nationalist views and xenophobia are very highly correlated with one another. Specifically, when Americans score highly on a comprehensive measure of xenophobia that includes perceptions of racial, economic, criminal, and cultural threat from immigrants, they nearly always also scored highly on a measure of Christian nationalism.Baker cited a statement issued in the summer of 2019 by James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, after Dobson visited the Mexican American border.Dobson’s statement:I can only report that without an overhaul of the law and the allocation of resources, millions of illegal immigrants will continue flooding to this great land from around the world. Many of them have no marketable skills. They are illiterate and unhealthy. Some are violent criminals. Their numbers will soon overwhelm the culture as we have known it, and it could bankrupt the nation. America has been a wonderfully generous and caring country since its founding. That is our Christian nature. But in this instance, we have met a worldwide wave of poverty that will take us down if we don’t deal with it. And it won’t take long for the inevitable consequences to happen.Estimates of the number of Christian nationalists in this country vary widely. Baker wrote that “using a multi-item measure of whether people want to see Christianity privileged in political and public spheres, a good estimate is that about 20 percent of Americans are Christian nationalists, and another 25 percent or so are at least sympathetic to some aspects of these views.”Despite these high numbers, Baker argues, the percentage of Christian nationalists is declining as a proportion of the overall population, “along with white Protestantism more generally,” which may increase the likelihood of violent protests.The decline, Baker wrote,is helping to fuel the renewed fervor with which we are witnessing efforts to impose Christian nationalism. Because these views are necessarily rooted in perceptions of cultural threat, declining numbers further stoke the persecution complex that motivates Christian nationalism. So Christian nationalism’s numeric decline and cultural resurgence are, ironically, directly connected.This “cultural resurgence” and the political clout that comes with it will do nothing to diminish their ambition to restore an imagined past, by any means necessary.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More