Tag: Hoover Dam

Footage from Trump’s rally in Tampa on Tuesday and a rally in Pennsylvania on Thursday shows attendees wearing T-shirts and carrying posters with the letter “Q” — a shorthand to identify followers of the conspiracy theory. Here’s what experts say you need to know about QAnon and why the conspiracy theory has spread. How did QAnon’s theories spread? Conspiracies take off because the world is complex and people like things to make sense, according to Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor at the fact-checking website Snopes.com, which frequently debunks online theories. But when theories explode on platforms with anonymous posters — like 4chan, one of the sites where QAnon started — Binkowski says they can be much harder to stop. Before their recent appearance at Trump rallies, QAnon conspiracy theorists have mostly stayed online – at the fringes of most mainstream message boards and social media platforms. That happened in December 2016, when a 28-year-old North Carolina man, who believed a conspiracy theory — one that is still spread by QAnon followers — showed up at a Washington, D.C. pizzeria where he believed children were being harbored because of baseless claims relating to Hillary Clinton’s, John Podesta. How can this kind of conspiracy theory be stopped? “People’s idea of what are acceptable political beliefs depends, to some extent, on what kind of cues they get from political elites. Trump is, by usual standards of U.S. politics, quite a conspiracy theorist.