The date was Jan. 20, 2021, and Stephen Miles Lewis was trying to keep the peace.
Two weeks before, a mob of pro-Trump protesters had stormed the Capitol, and the circles Mr. Lewis ran in were now brimming with tension. Many of his closest friends had been outraged by what they saw. But he also knew someone who had been there, who now claimed that the violence had been stirred up by antifa agents disguised as Trump supporters.
Mr. Lewis, a middle-aged man with a round face and a gray beard who goes by the nickname SMiles, sat at his desk, in front of a wall covered with posters of aliens, flying saucers and Bigfoot. In a YouTube video, he urged viewers to “take a step back and hopefully think, meditate, reflect on the times that we’re in,” to not “malign the others’ viewpoint.” He expressed frustration that the term “conspiracy theorist” was increasingly being used as an insult. After all, he pointed out: “I am a conspiracy theorist.”
At the time, Mr. Lewis was trying to project calm, to help ensure that the community he’d been part of since he was 18 didn’t tear itself apart. But in the years since, he has found himself unsettled by the darker elements of a world he thought he knew.
Over the past year, I’ve been part of an academic research projectseeking to understand how the internet changed conspiracy theories. Many of the dynamics the internet creates are, at this point, well understood: We know its capacity to help users find one another, making it easier than ever for people to get involved in conspiracy networks; we also know how social media platforms prioritize inflammatory content and that as a result, ideas and information that make people angry travel farther.
What we felt was missing from this story, though, was what this period of change looked like from the perspective of conspiracy theorists themselves.
My team has been speaking to researchers and writers who were part of this world or connected to it in the pre-social media era. And we’ve learned something surprising: Many of the people we’ve interviewed told us they, too, have spent the past few years baffled by the turn conspiracy culture has taken. Many expressed discomfort with and at times outright disgust for QAnon and the related theories claiming the 2020 election was stolen, and said that they felt as if the very worst elements of conspiracy culture had become its main representatives.
It’s worth noting that our sample was biased by who agreed to speak to us. While all of conspiracy culture can be characterized by its deep skepticism, that skepticism doesn’t always point in the same direction. Although we’ve approached as many people as possible, so far it’s mostly been those on the left of the political spectrum who have been interested in talking to university researchers. (They’ve also been overwhelmingly men.)
Still, what our interviewees had to say was striking: The same forces that have made conspiracy theories unavoidable in our politics have also fundamentally changed them, to the extent that even those who pride themselves on their openness to alternative viewpoints — Sept. 11 truthers, Kennedy assassination investigators and U.F.O. cover-up researchers — have been alarmed by what they’ve seen.
Mr. Lewis’s sense that conspiracy networks would be rived by tensions in the aftermath of Jan. 6 was well founded. Rumors immediately began circulating that the rioters had been infiltrated by agents instigating violence — an accusation that some of the rioters themselves took to social media to denounce. Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who was fatally shot by a police officer during the attack, was simultaneously lionized as a martyr and derided as a false flag.
All this ultimately left Mr. Lewis less inclined to play peacemaker and more inclined to take a step away from it all. Today, he says, he increasingly avoids some of the language that floats around the conspiracysphere: Terms like “the illuminati” used to feel like fun ideas to play with. Now he worries they could be used to create scapegoats, or even encourage violence.
SMiles Lewis grew up in Austin, Texas, with his mother — his parents separated when he was very young — and it was his close connection with her that first sparked his interest in the unexplained: “There was a sense, early on with my mom and I, where we felt like we were reading each other’s minds,” he said. The two of them would watch shows like “That’s Incredible!,”which retold stories of paranormal encounters. Mr. Lewis recalls his mother telling him after one episode: “If you are ever in distress, just concentrate on me really hard, and I will get the message.” Her theory got put to the test when Mr. Lewis was a teenager: Once, when home alone, he heard voices in their yard after dark. Afraid, he considered calling his mother, but the fear of losing precious new adult freedoms stopped him. The next day she asked him if everything had been all right, because out of nowhere, she had felt the overwhelming urge to call. Mr. Lewis took this as confirmation that there was more to human abilities than science could yet rationalize.
Once Mr. Lewis graduated from high school, he joined the Austin chapter of the Mutual U.F.O. Network, an organization for enthusiasts to meet and discuss sightings. From there, he became the leader of a support group for people who believed they’d had close encounters with aliens. Mr. Lewis never had such an experience himself, but he said the group didn’t mind — they just appreciated that he kept an open mind.
U.F.O.s and conspiracy theories have always been intertwined, but it was Sept. 11 that really turned Mr. Lewis political. As he speculated in an editorial for The Austin Para Times after the planes hit the towers, he felt that he had “been a witness to Amerika’s greatest Reichstag event” — a planned disaster to justify fascist encroachment on civil liberties, something many of the writers Mr. Lewis admired had warned of.
For Mr. Lewis, conspiracism was always about thinking critically about the narratives of the powerful and questioning your own biases. In our interviews, he saw his interest in the parapolitical — in how intelligence and security services quietly shape the world — as connected to his political activism, not so different from attending an abortion rights rally or joining a local anti-Patriot Act group. All were about standing up for civil liberties and citizen privacy against an opportunistic, overreaching state……