30 “The Virus, the Vaccine, and the Dark Side of Wellness,” Harper’s Bazaar, March 16, 2021, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a35823360/covid-19-vaccine-qanon-wellness-influencers; E. J. Dickson, “Wellness Influencers Are Calling Out QAnon Conspiracy Theorists for Spreading Lies,” Rolling Stone, September 15, 2020, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/qanon-wellness-influencers-seane-corn-yoga-1059856.
31 Kaitlyn Tiffany, “The Women Making Conspiracy Theories Beautiful,” The Atlantic, August 18, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/08/how-instagram-aesthetics-repackage-qanon/615364.
32 Derek Beres, Julian Walker, and Matthew Remski, Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat (New York: Public Affairs, 2023), chap. 1.
33 Charlotte Ward and David Voas, “The Emergence of Conspirituality,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 26, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 103–121, https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2011.539846.
34 Martin Riedl, Josephine Lukito, and Samuel Woolley, “Political Influencers on Social Media: An Introduction,” Social Media and Society 9, no. 2 (June 7, 2023): 205630512311779, https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231177938.
35 For an interesting profile of Chris Rufo that examines his avowed leveraging of propaganda tactics (such as deliberately setting out to redefine the term critical race theory) in service to accomplishing his goals, see Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict over Critical Race Theory,” New Yorker, June 18, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/news /annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory.
36 Philipp Margolin, “Distort, Discredit, Dismiss: The Manipulation Playbook of Anti-science Actors, Part 2,” The Protagonist Future?, May 15, 2023, https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/distort-discredit-dismiss.
37 Robert Tracinski, “The Populist Right Isn’t Interested in Elite Accountability,” The UnPopulist, November 18, 2022, https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/the-populist-right-isnt-interested.
38 Adam, “Twitter’s Main Character,” Know Your Meme, July 13, 2023, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/twitters-main-character; Maple Cocaine (@maplecocaine), “Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it,” Twitter, January 2, 2019, https://twitter.com/maplecocaine/status/1080665226410889217.
39 Reeves Wiedeman, “PissPigGranddad, the Punk-Rock Florist Who Fought ISIS in Syria, Is Coming Home,” Intelligencer, April 3, 2017, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/brace-belden-pisspiggranddad-syria-isis.html.
40 Sam Jaffe Goldstein, “Jeffrey Epstein Is a Feature of Our System: A Conversation with Liz Franczak and Brace Belden, Hosts of ‘Trueanon,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, January 30, 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/jeffrey-epstein-is-a-feature-of-our-system-a-conversation-with-liz-franczak-and-brace-belden-hosts-of-trueanon.
41 These two topics, in quick succession, dominated The Discourse in one week of June 2023.
42 Helen Lewis, “Extremophiles, the Internet’s Favorite Personality Type,” The Atlantic, January 31, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/internet-youtube-podcast-guru-influencers-andrew-tate/672867.
43 David A. Graham, “The Unlabelling of an ‘Anti-Muslim Extremist,’” The Atlantic, June 18, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maajid-nawaz-v-splc/562646.
44 Vanessa Thorpe, “LBC’s Maajid Nawaz’s Fascination with Conspiracies Raises Alarm,” The Guardian, January 31, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/jan/31/lbcs-maajid-nawazs-fascination-with-conspiracies-raises-alarm.
45 Gurwinder Bhogal, “The Perils of Audience Capture: How Influencers Become Brainwashed by Their Audience,” The Prism (blog), Substack, June 30, 2022. https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture.
46 Maajid Nawaz (@MaajidNawaz), “Titan sub search & oxygen countdown= scam…,” Twitter, June 24, 2023, https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1672698980558307333.
47 Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 106–107.
48 Gurwinder Bhogal defines audience capture, in a very thorough explainer post, as a feedback loop that “involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person’s identity with one custom-made for the audience.” Bhogal, “The Perils of Audience Capture.”
49 Klein, Doppelganger, 131.
50 Ibid., 106–107.
51 Charli, https://www.charlidamelio.com.
52 X (@x), “Surprise! Today we launched our Creator Ads Revenue Sharing program…,” Twitter, July 14, 2023, https://twitter.com/X/status/1679572360695824384.
53 Taylor Lorenz, “Far-Right Twitter Influencers First on Elon Musk’s Monetization Scheme,” Washington Post, updated July 14, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/13/twitter-creators-payments-right-wing.
