Politics
Opinion: Want to convince a conspiracy theory believer they're wrong? Don't start with the truth
Not long ago, a millennial father of two in the Midwest whom I interviewed was convinced that many of our elected leaders like to feast on the flesh of children. He feared that the world was at the mercy of a depraved club of the richest and most powerful among us, one armed with space lasers and clones.
Most shocking to those who knew him weren’t the conspiracy theories themselves. It was that he had come to believe them. Nearing 40 years old, he was a college-educated, upstanding guy with friends, a family and an established career. How, they wondered, had this perfectly sane person gone crazy?
It’s a question more and more Americans are asking about their own loved ones. As disinformation permeates our culture, the road to QAnon-type territory is getting shorter. Healthy skepticism easily gives way to undue suspicion. The dizzying public reaction to Donald Trump’s near-assassination was a perfect illustration: Observers across the political spectrum raced to fill the information void with baseless assertions that have gained momentum despite mounting evidence to the contrary, revealing a nation increasingly at odds with reality.
The statistics are as stunning as the falsehoods. Millions of people now believe that the government, media and financial worlds are “controlled by Satan-worshiping pedophiles,” according to recent polling. These aren’t loosely held views. While reporting for my book “The Quiet Damage,” I talked to people all over the country who had tried until they were blue in the face to make the conspiracy theorists in their lives accept the truth.
But the truth is almost beside the point.
It seems entirely sensible to fight fiction with fact. In spite of passionately professed allegiances to “the truth,” however, ardent conspiracy theory adopters seldom have a desire to be accurately informed. Belief in the unbelievable, in many cases, stems from desperation to meet fundamental human needs, such as feeling valued and having a purpose. Over the last three years, while interviewing hundreds of disinformation-splintered families, it has become clear to me that facts alone can’t fix this. The solution begins with treating conspiracy theory obsession not as a sickness but as a symptom.
For the Midwestern father, the trouble began after an injury largely robbed him of his mobility — and, in turn, much of his life’s meaning. Once an active family man, he was suddenly stuck in a chair. His wife took up solo hobbies and completed the housework alone; his children played with friends instead of with their dad. If he couldn’t fulfill his role as a husband and father in the ways he always had, who was he?
In the QAnon quagmire, which he eventually stumbled into online, he was a patriot helping to bring “deep state” corruption to light. One of the good guys fighting the good fight. Someone who mattered again. During his gradual journey from QAnon-curious to feverishly embracing the most crackpot claims, his critical thinking skills didn’t mysteriously vanish — they were overpowered.
Human needs are just that: needs. Our innate need for things such as meaning and belonging is superseded only by what the body requires for subsistence, and not by any thirst for accuracy or truth. When these needs go unmet, we can become desperate to satisfy them by whatever means necessary. And the conditions that leave people deprived of what they need and susceptible to irrational conspiracy theories are common — and commonly overlooked.
In movements such as QAnon, the lonely find belonging, the aimless find direction and the angry find validation. Consider baby boomers, who share an alarming amount of fake news online. Many people believe that some mix of cognitive aging, poor digital literacy and too much Fox News is to blame. But this overlooks a bigger issue. Conspiracy-theory-entranced seniors have described to me how, before adopting a QAnon-like brand of what some called “activism,” they felt as if society no longer valued or had use for them. Facing what experts have identified as an “epidemic of loneliness,” they yearned for purpose, community and fulfillment.
By their nature, conspiracy theories provide all of the above. They give supporters an enemy to oppose and a cause to rally around. It’s not difficult to see how churning out Facebook posts (errantly) warning about killer COVID vaccines could have felt like a gratifying self-appointed job in retirement. Or how latching onto delusions that offer convenient answers and clear villains in times of debilitating uncertainty can restore feelings of agency and security.
There’s no singular mold of conspiracy theorists or set of circumstances that shapes them. In my research, I’ve encountered people of all generations, classes, races and political leanings. All had their own reasons for believing and their own needs to satisfy. A political psychology study published on factors that predispose people to conspiracy theories shows that those less capable of “bouncing back” from hardship are more susceptible, suggesting that espousing these views can be a crutch. At the deepest level, then, it doesn’t necessarily matter to believers whether Taylor Swift is truly a psy-op or chemtrails are poisoning the skies. What matters is how clinging to such convictions serves the believers’ underlying needs.
In the end, it wasn’t the truth that saved the Midwestern father, though he has come to see it clearly again. After badly damaging his life at rock bottom of the rabbit hole, he carved a long, sometimes bizarre and profoundly difficult path toward recovering his sense of purpose as a parent and partner. Only then did the ludicrous lies he’d been so consumed by lose their hold over him. He no longer needed them.
Success stories like this will remain rare if we don’t shift our approach to this crisis. We’re living in a moment where a slew of critical stressors, including an unprecedented election season and an artificial intelligence boom, are fueling a tsunami of disinformation and leaving many of us mentally and emotionally compromised. As more Americans turn to conspiracy theories to cope, we must remind ourselves that we can’t do away with delusions that meet people’s fundamental needs by simply debunking them. We need to focus on the cause, not the symptom — to look past the lunacy and probe the roots of our collective vulnerability — because none of us is as immune as we would like to think.
Jesselyn Cook is a reporter and journalism lecturer. Her new book is “The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family.”
WASHINGTON — Asylum seekers may be turned away without a hearing at the southern border, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a historic retreat from the promise of relief for those who say they are fleeing persecution.
The justices split over whether this was a simple dispute over legal wording or a moral question involving desperate families.
Siding with the Trump administration, the court’s conservatives said the Refugee Act of 1980 offers a right to seek asylum to migrants who “arrive in the United States” but not those who are turned back when they approach a border crossing or a port of entry.
“This case presents a straightforward question” that turns on the word “in,” said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. “In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place — for example, a house, a city, or a country — before the person enters that place.”
The liberal dissenters agreed with immigration rights lawyers who saw this as a nonsensical reading of the law.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the asylum law arose from the “international moral reckoning that followed the Holocaust and World War II.”
She cited the infamous voyage of the MS St. Louis in 1939. More than 900 Jewish refugees attempted to flee persecution in Nazi Germany by setting sail aboard the ship, which was turned away from Cuba and the United States.
Most of the passengers were returned to Europe, and several hundred died in the Holocaust, she said.
“Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980 because it did not want this country to repeat the mistakes of its past. Yet if the refugees on the M.S. St. Louis were to walk up to a port of entry on our southern border today, the majority’s interpretation would allow immigration officers to refuse even to consider their asylum applications by physically blocking them from stepping foot onto U.S. soil,” Sotomayor wrote.
Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed.
The decision upholds a turn-back policy that began in 2016 as an emergency response to a surge of Haitian immigrants at the San Ysidro border crossing.
The Department of Homeland Security said these asylum seekers must wait on the Mexican side of the border until they could return for a scheduled interview. The policy was extended to other border crossings, but it was challenged as illegal in federal court in San Diego.
Last year, a divided 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that those restrictions were illegal if they prevented migrants from applying for asylum.
“To ‘arrive’ means ‘to reach a destination,’” wrote Judge Michelle Friedland. “A person who presents herself to an official at the border has ‘arrived.’”
She said the “government’s reading would reflect a radical reconstruction of the right to apply for asylum because it would give the executive branch vast discretion to prevent people from applying by blocking them at the border.”
The 2-1 decision upheld a federal judge’s ruling in San Diego for migrants who had filed a class-action suit and said they were wrongly denied an asylum hearing.
But Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer urged the Supreme Court to review and reverse the appellate ruling, noting 15 judges of the 9th Circuit joined dissents that called the decision “radical” and “clearly wrong.”
The administration argued federal immigration law “does not grant aliens throughout the world a right to enter the United States so that they can seek asylum.”
From abroad, they may “seek admission as refugees,” Sauer said, but the government may enforce its laws by “blocking illegal immigrants from stepping on U.S. soil.”
Defenders of the asylum system denounced the decision.
“We believe that today’s ruling violates international law, as well as the express intent of Congress,” said Erika Pinheiro, executive director of the migrant support organization Al Otro Lado, which led the legal fight. “For decades, the United States has allowed individuals and families who are fleeing persecution, torture and death to ask for protection at U.S. borders.”
“Cruelty is not a substitute for real solutions. Blocking people from seeking asylum at official ports of entry will do nothing to fix our broken immigration system,” said Rebecca Cassler, senior litigation attorney at the American Immigration Council. “It only makes things more chaotic and dangerous for vulnerable families.”
The Federation for American Immigration Reform applauded the decision.
“Our immigration laws are written to be pro-enforcement, not anti-enforcement,” said Christopher J. Hajec, deputy general counsel of FAIR. “Because of this, courts that hamstring enforcement are often forced to violate basic logic, as the 9th Circuit did here. We are pleased the Supreme Court saw that the lower court’s reading would make immigration law incoherent, and reversed.”
Politics
Jeffries welcomes Democratic Socialists into the fold as critics warn party is revealing ‘exactly who it is’
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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries publicly embraced a new crop of congressional nominees Saturday, including three Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates whose primary victories have fueled fresh debate over the Democratic Party’s leftward shift ahead of the 2026 midterms.
The powerful New York lawmaker’s post highlights the challenge facing the top House Democrat as he works to unite his party ahead of the general election. If Democrats take back the House in November, Jeffries is expected to become the next speaker. That means he’ll likely be leading a Democratic caucus with more self-described Democratic Socialists than ever before. So far, more than a dozen Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates have won or advanced in primaries across the country this election cycle.
In a post on X, Jeffries wrote, “Congratulations to our Democratic nominees,” before listing the party’s congressional candidates from across New York. Among those recognized were Brad Lander, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, all of whom are affiliated with or backed by the Democratic Socialists of America and secured victories in closely watched Democratic primaries last week.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called Trump official Bill Pulte a “malignant clown.” (Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg)
“From public servants to union organizers to community activists, the path is different but the work is the same,” Jeffries wrote. “We must decisively address the affordability crisis and crush far-right extremism!”
RISING SOCIALIST STARS ON TRACK TO CONGRESS: WHO ARE DARIALIZA AVILA CHEVALIER, BRAD LANDER AND CLAIRE VALDEZ?
Lander, Chevalier and Valdez all received backing from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose endorsements helped cement the growing influence of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing in New York politics. Lander and Chevalier defeated Jeffries-endorsed incumbents Reps. Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat in their respective Democratic primaries. Jeffries did not endorse in the race won by Claire Valdez, which was an open seat.
Now, as Democrats turn their attention to the general election, he appears to be rallying behind the party’s nominees as they try to win back the House in November.
The socialist candidates have also faced scrutiny over resurfaced social media posts, support for defunding the police and anti-Israel rhetoric, positions that have put them at odds with many in the Democratic Party.
Socialist New York congressional nominees Darializa Avila Chevalier (L), Claire Valdez (C) and Brad Lander. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images; Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Chevalier has faced scrutiny over resurfaced social media posts, including one in which she called to “literally abolish the border.”
She has also faced renewed scrutiny over past social media posts targeting leading Democrats, including calling former President Joe Biden a “war criminal,” attacking former Vice President Kamala Harris and rebuking Sen. Bernie Sanders over Israel.
Like Chevalier, Valdez and Lander, who is Jewish, share her sentiment that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.
LIBERAL MS NOW WRITER CALLS MAMDANI PRIMARY SWEEP A ‘GENUINELY SCARY NIGHT FOR NEW YORK CITY JEWS’
Jeffries’ decision to publicly congratulate the three nominees quickly drew criticism.
The Republican Jewish Coalition blasted Jeffries’ congratulatory message, warning Jewish voters that these candidates are not the Democrat “fringe” but the new faces of the party.
“To Jewish Democrats: your party is telling you EXACTLY who it is,” the Coalition wrote. “These future members of Congress, who @hakeemjeffries is welcoming with open arms, want to: Abolish prisons and borders. Defund the police. Downplay 9/11,” rattling off other serious controversies stemming from the candidates.
Jamie Metzl, a former National Security Council and State Department official and lifelong Democrat, blasted Jeffries for congratulating the nominees.
New York City Mayor Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks at a news conference Thursday in Manhattan. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
“When I first read this post, I assumed it was from a spoof account. I am deeply concerned that it appears to be all too real,” Metzl wrote. “To welcome these nominees without acknowledging and criticizing their self-declared sympathies for U.S.-designated terrorist organizations, their calls to abolish the police, their stated desire to dismantle Western civilization, and their blatant anti-Americanism is to sacrifice the core principles of the Democratic Party.”
Metzl accused Jeffries of putting his bid to become House speaker ahead of the Democratic Party’s principles.
“I understand your ambition to become Speaker should Democrats retake the House, but you should not sacrifice the principles of our party to advance your own political aspirations,” Metzl wrote.
Democratic leadership has been in the hot seat this week facing questions from the media about how to reconcile support for the New York slate of socialist candidates, particularly after Valdez’s supporters were seen shouting “you’re next” at a television screen showing Jeffries on Tuesday night.
“They’re gonna eat you next Congressman – and replace you with one of their own,” conservative commentator Meghan McCain posted on X.
“This is funny,” conservative commentator Robby Starbuck posted on X. “Hakeem still doesn’t realize that the communists are going to eat him alive. Clearly not a student of history. Bless his heart.”
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In a CNN appearance on Friday, Jeffries said, “I think that what happens in a handful of primaries in one of the bluest cities in the country is not in any way indicative of what needs to happen in November, where we need to reelect every single frontline Member, common sense Democrats, authentically committed to making life better for the American people, opposing these extreme Republicans who have been nothing but a reckless rubber stamp for Donald Trump’s agenda.”
“And at the same period of time, make sure that we flip red seats blue, including in New York-17, where we have a combat veteran, incredibly patriotic American Cait Conley, who came out of a primary on Tuesday as well and is an incredibly strong candidate. She will defeat Mike Lawler in New York in November.”
Twenty-four days after the polls closed on election day, Los Angeles County officials have certified the results from the 2,227,461 ballots cast. Despite questions raised about the pace of the vote count, a Times analysis found ballots this June were tallied faster than in previous cycles.
California is known to have a slow vote count, partially because of the state’s grace period for mail-in ballots. This year, counties were required to report most of the ballots by June 15, with some exceptions, including for mail-in ballots received within seven days of election day and ballots requiring additional verification such as signature curing. The process has spurred baseless claims of fraud from President Trump and others, leading the U.S. Supreme Court to take up a case on whether mail-in ballots must be received by election day to count.
The state has reported 9.4 million processed ballots. Officials estimate about 5 ballots remain to be counted and 17,650 are waiting to cure a missing or mismatched signature.
Compared with the last time both governor and Los Angeles mayor were on the ballot, county election officials counted more ballots, and tallied them faster than in 2022, The Times found.
In Los Angeles County, turnout jumped from 28% of eligible voters in the 2022 primary to 38% this June, according to the county registrar. Meanwhile, the share of vote-by-mail ballots dropped about 3 percentage points to 82%, indicating a rise in in-person voting.
Statewide, early results show 41% of registered voters turned up for the June election, up from 33% in 2022, according to the secretary of state. County elections officials must report their final results by July 3, giving state officials a week to certify all election results.
The Los Angeles Times reports election results from the county clerk as well as from the Associated Press. The AP provides ballot counts, a calculation of the expected vote and race calls for statewide and national races.
The expected vote percentage, or EEVP, is an estimate of the total number of votes that will eventually be certified. That number can be adjusted based on new information over time.
“Before counting begins in California, our estimates are primarily informed by turnout in past similar elections plus pre-election data on ballot returns, with projections based on what percentage of ballots had already been received at the same point in past elections,” AP director of election analytics Emily Swanson said in an email.
In the gubernatorial and mayoral races, more than half of the votes were counted by the end of election day, EEVP data show.
Swanson’s team also observed a faster vote count this year than in the 2022 and 2024 primaries.
In January 2024, L.A. County consolidated its election operations into a new ballot processing center in the City of Industry. Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County registrar-recorder/county clerk’s office, told The Times earlier this month that the facility, which is open to observers, is designed for transparency, security and efficiency.
“It doesn’t take long to count. The counting process is very fast,” Logan said ahead of election day. “What extends the time period is those options that are provided under California law for voters — to allow everyone the opportunity to vote up until election day, and then allowing us the time to process those with the same level of security and integrity that we did the ballots that were received two weeks before the election.”
Despite the faster count, the Associated Press took longer to call winners, suggesting these races were more competitive. The AP makes such declarations by determining whether there is an opportunity for a trailing candidate to catch up to the race leader. It has been calling races for nearly 180 years.
Both the gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral race saw a 30% increase in votes from 2022. The governor’s race received more than 9.2 million votes compared with 7 million in 2022. The Los Angeles mayor’s race received more than 850,000 votes, an increase from nearly 650,000 in 2022.
The vote counting process for California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada and Alaska may change for the November midterm election, depending on which way the U.S. Supreme Court rules.
Data and graphics assistant editor Sean Greene contributed to this report.
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