Most of us heard about the craziness of the QAnon conspiracy theory long after it jumped into the mainstream.

Originating in the Anon message boards on 4Chan (and all of its successive iterations), what began as a joke became real. Or, to be more precise, a real conspiracy theory. Which was the only real thing about it.

And yet, it has had real effect in the real world.

Most people have heard about Pizzagate; where a man was radicalized by the spiritual predecessor to this online cult. He believed the stories he read online of pedophilia and human trafficking from a pizza parlor. These stories were entirely made up.

His actions, however, were real. As are the actions of people spreading misinformation.

This, I think, is what we struggle with most. Not that conspiracy theories exist or how they work. But when the theories themselves become tangible. When people knowingly advance them. And act upon them.

We’ll tear our hair out trying to reason this out. To look into how people can believe such ridiculous things. This is the puzzle we will turn over and over in our minds.

What we won’t reckon with is what to do with conspiracies themselves.

We’ve blocked our own thinking.

Because we are so used to conspiracy theories, which are precisely that: theories, we are unfamiliar with how to handle genuine conspiracies.

QAnon is, perhaps, the most illuminating example of it. QAnon is a progenitor of conspiracy that was born out of a conspiracy theory.

Before there were people communicating and planning to overthrow state and federal governments and murder non-existent pedophiles, there was a conspiracy theory.

And before there was a conspiracy theory, there were joke Anon posts on the internet. Anons threads are a kind of conspiratorial fan fiction that feels like a reboot of The X-Files written by the cigarette smoking man: the truth must be out there.

What we seem to struggle with is the permeability of the bounds between fake and real. That conspiracies must all be fake. And that the only thing that’s real is the occasional bad apple who doesn’t get the joke.

We hold a skeptical posture to everything.

Which prevents us from seeing the truth. Not because we’re skeptical, but because we make a fundamental miscalculation about truth.

Our incredulity to both the theorists and the people who believe the theories means that we don’t treat the actions themselves as in any way real. We treat them as merely a consequence of belief, deception, or some other version of being duped.

In short, we treat every conspiracy as if it were a theory. Every speculation we then make of potential conspiracies are therefore fake.

So none of it is real.

We are unprepared for real conspiracies.

Federal agencies infiltrated labor unions in the 1930s and ‘40s to both root out Communists and drive blue collar workers to the right.

The CIA infiltrated social justice groups in the 1950s through ‘70s to undermine efforts for civil and equal rights.

And conservative groups in the 1960s and ’70s plotted to take over religious groups, most famously succeeding with the Southern Baptist Convention.

When we talk about these actual conspiracies, we are, in one sense, merely speaking about our history.

And yet, we feel like saying these things is hinky. Like we’re suddenly blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Even as we know they are true. We have the documented evidence, the history books, the personal accounts, all of it!

Something about the hidden nature of conspiracy and our public dismissal of them, leads us to discredit ourselves. That somehow, real, factual conspiracies get tangled up with flat-earthers and QAnon.

I don’t think we do this on purpose exactly.

What I think is happening is that we’ve put conspiracy itself in the fake bucket. Even when it has real consequences.

When the fever broke.

The violence on January 6th was a wakeup call. But I think it was particularly confounding for those most likely to have all conspiracies placed firmly in the fake bucket.

Seeing the real-world impact of belief in conspiracy theory did something to people. It wasn’t one guy we could dismiss. The proverbial lone-wolf acting badly.

[Here I remind you that the narrative of the lone-wolf comes not from investigators, but from the Christian Identity Movement, part of the wider White Power Movement. They want the legal system to see the Movement itself as intangible. So it must target an individual for prosecution — which protects the movement itself.]

Always making it about one person means there can never be a conspiracy.

But it was, in fact, real. And massive. Doors breaking, people trampled, dying.

The conspiracy theories that fueled January 6th created conspiracy. And our refusal to see conspiracy, and our legal system’s refusal to prosecute conspiracy, continues to fuel conspiracy itself as something unprovable.

And we make unprovable the same as fake.

In a very literal sense, our behavior, in conceding to the idea that conspiracies are often fundamentally unprovable, is to render them meaningless. It encourages skepticism of all conspiracies. Not just theories.

And when we’re skeptical of all conspiracies, we can’t help but look back at the old things and go…Well…maybe I’m missing something…

The people engaging in conspiracies, such as those planning the January 6th hijacking of the Capital, want us to think there was no coordination. No provable conspiracy. Because that threatens the project.

The project, in their case, was clearly to overthrow the election and install Donald Trump as president. But every real conspiracy has a project that requires multiple actors to do something bigger.

It was the Christian Identity Movement that targeted and executed the Oklahoma City Bombing. But our inability to both embody a legal framework for prosecuting that movement and our mutual comfort in blaming only Timothy McVeigh for carrying it out is our own conspiracy.

How to overcome our bias.

Our bias is against believing conspiracies exist. That people actively plan to do things. This is both demonstrably false and foolhardy.

We also have a bias toward believing little can be done to deal with this. This, too, is false.

But to do this, we must start by recognizing precisely what we’re doing with our perception of what is real and what is fake. That we are actually confusing ourselves—and convincing each other to miss what we actually are seeing.

And let’s be honest. We tend to dismiss anything that has a whiff of conspiratorial to it as politically motivated. That the person naming the problem is doing so for partisan reasons. This is what fueled the backlash to Black Lives Matter—not purely because of race, but because it was interpreted as a liberal (read: Democrat) thing.

Our willingness to dispute the veracity of truth because of partisan motivation or because it sounds vaguely conspiratorial or because our legal system does not know how to prosecute it creates a new bias.

We become biased against conspiratorial thinking itself.

Which is why that bias may be the easiest one to get at. LIFO—Last in, first out. It is our weakest bias and the one we are most inclined to recognize.

Like when I talk about history (even history that I have experienced!) and then stop myself in the middle. And I say out loud: “I know this sounds conspiratorial!” Because it just feels weird.

But as we overcome our refusal to acknowledge conspiracies, we can begin to see more of the very thing conspiracy theories promise: the truth.

And maybe then we’ll have easier time naming what is going on.