These are the words of Joseph Uscinski, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami.

I spoke to Joe for Webworm, and our conversation made me wonder if things aren’t quite as fucked up as they seem.

So I guess today’s newsletter is… hopeful, somehow?

Joe Uscinski wrote American Conspiracy Theories (an excellent book) and as you probably gathered from the title, he’s very passionate about conspiracy theories.

He’s a member of the University of Miami U-LINK team, which combats online extremist conspiracy theories, and also does a fuckload of survey work for the likes of the Pew Research Centre.

In short, he really has his finger on the pulse about what Americans believe.

And as debate raged about the possible identity of Q this week, I wanted to talk to Joe about how widespread the believe in QAnon actually is, and how worried we should be.

I wanted to know the scale of the problem.

I really like Joe. He’s well educated and opinionated — and he’s also a great speaker. Right now, he’s in hot demand. I accidentally Skyped him on the wrong day, and he sounded upbeat but also kinda exhausted. He’d just done six American press interviews in a row, most of them about QAnon.

When I reconnected, I really loved our conversation. I think my kiwi accent threw him a little, and there were a lot of laughs as we talked. The podcast version of this newsletter is really fun. He swears quite a bit.

In short — we kinda disagree on some things — but I knew we would.

He thinks the problem of people disappearing down conspiratorial rabbit holes is no worse than it’s ever been.

That it’s exactly the same.

Joe told me social media isn’t to blame. I struggle with this, but he’s smart and I wanted to hear him out.

We also agreed on a lot of things, including the bit where he yelled at me:

“This is a plea to the conspiracy theorists - make up something fucking new, so that I can actually give a shit at this point! Because it is so boring, oh my God!”

I found this conversation fascinating, and at times confronting. I hope you enjoy it.

Like all the content here on Webworm, this edition is possible thanks to subscribers. They fund the work here, and also get access to bonus newsletters and podcasts. If it doesn’t cause you financial hardship, you can sign up here to stay across future episodes:

You can consume our conversation in two ways: a podcast you can listen to (above), or a written version you can read (below).

Take your pick.

David.

Joe - you are a polls expert. Take it away!

Just to give you a rundown of the polls in this country, I will tell you the brief history of why I started polling QAnon, because it wasn’t even something I was paying attention to in mid-2018. 

It got brought to my attention, largely from a little bit of online harassment that I got from these Q people! They went through all my pictures on Twitter and decided to make a collage suggesting I was a satanic sex trafficker. 

It was the dumbest pictures they picked — and of course they found one of me wearing red socks, and the red socks mean you are a sex trafficker, or eat babies, or something like that.

At that point I thought, “OK, let’s see what’s happening here.”

And what happened very quickly in late July of 2018 was that some people wore QAnon tee shirts to a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida — my home state.

And because of that, QAnon got a tonne of media coverage, in all the major newspapers. So I decided I was going to run a poll in Florida. And I thought “why don’t I throw QAnon on here, and just see what happens?”

And a lot of people didn’t know what it was, and it was not rated very highly.

So we said “how would you rate the QAnon movement on a scale from zero to 100, where 100 is “you really like it” and zero is “you really hate it.”

It came out with about an average of 22. And to put that in perspective, it was about a point higher than where Floridians rated Fidel Castro! And if you know anything about Florida, it’s that we don’t like Castro here! So it was not liked. 

But what was even more telling was that the average rating from Democrats and from Republicans were not different. So they both disliked it about equally. 

And what predicted belief in QAnon was not being Republican or Conservative, but just having a conspiratorial world view. So this idea that QAnon is a far right conspiracy theory does just not hold water at all.

There is nothing conservative about it, except for positing Trump as a hero — but he is not a hero because he is Republican, but because he is an outsider.

I have repeated this poll in Florida just in June, and several other polls nationwide, and have found no growth [in QAnon belief] whatsoever. 

So most people don’t know what this is, the vast majority of people don’t like it, and it’s not gaining in popularity.

However the headlines in all the newspapers are the exact opposite. They say “it is huge and getting bigger, it’s gone mainstream, it’s taking over American life, it’s far right…”

Of course, they never tell you what that means. 

I mean I am reading a piece in the New York Times right now, and the headline says “The republican embrace of QAnon goes far beyond Trump”, that’s the kind of headline we see everywhere.

But it really doesn’t.

I mean maybe it goes a little bit beyond Trump, but it doesn’t go far beyond Trump. 

So what is happening here? Are we seeing a huge disconnect between the reporting and the perception of what your polling numbers are actually saying?

Well the data is out there, I published my initial poll in the Washington Post, I followed up with my polls in the Washington Post, the Emerson poll is out there for anyone to see, the Pew poll is out there — and that made headlines!

So there is no excuse at this point for journalists to get this wrong. So they are doing it purposefully.

And I think some of them are starting to see, and to change their language, just enough to get away with the crap: “Oh, well, there are millions of QAnon accounts - and that’s growing…” 

Right? And if you are not reading carefully… accounts aren’t people. Accounts are accounts, who knows if they are sincere, or real people, or if one person has 1000 accounts.

So some of this is, frankly, dishonest at this point. I would have forgiven them before, but they should know better.

And I don’t want to speculate on people’s motives — it may be that they are chasing clicks, by inciting this moral panic. It could be that the mainstream news legacy outlets have it in for social media, and are more than happy to attack them saying they are turning everyone into a nutcase, when in fact they are not. 

It could be that there is some political bias here, maybe it is easy for them to say “Republicans are a bunch of QAnon nutcases” and then ignore stuff like ANTIFA and stuff like that.

I think there is this thing at the moment where people are coming across the idea of a conspiracy theory for the first time, and they are panicking about it. I feel that in America, it’s been a part of its culture to have this way of thinking about things! That what you are told is not necessarily the truth. I mean, right back to the foundations of the country, it’s always been there. It just feels like perhaps there is this knee-jerk reaction to what we are seeing now.

I mean it’s true it’s always been there, but it’s also a media myth that the US is exceptional in this way. I would say Americans are exceptional in many ways, but conspiracy theories is just not one of them!

Polling, when you do it across countries… we are middling, at best.

If you read the news headlines, whenever a major newspaper will talk about conspiracy theories in whatever country, it’s always the people of that country who are the most conspiratorial!

All these claims are based on nothing, it’s all baloney.

And also when you read about “when is the time of conspiracy theories?” - journalists say it’s always “now, now. Now is the time.” And you can find headlines almost every year saying “this is the golden age, this is the time!”

But it can’t always be true.

I am just ob