(GUARDIAN) -- The other week, Donald Trump was upstaged at a campaign rally in Florida, not by Representative Ron DeSantis, for whom the rally was ostensibly held, and not by some rowdy supporters, and not by the media. No, Trump was eclipsed by an alleged shadowy figure named Q – a person at the heart of the “QAnon” conspiracy theory, which holds, among other things, that special counsel Robert Mueller is not actually investigating Russian election interference, but rather top Democrats’ involvement in a variety of criminal enterprises, including child sex trafficking.
Conspiracy theories, and more generally misconceptions about public policy, are nothing new, but they are taking up greater prominence in media and political discourse seemingly like never before, and not just in the United States. Two-thirds of people surveyed in the Middle East and North Africa gave at least some credence to the idea that the US was secretly trying to help the Islamic State, according to one recent study. In Hungary, the prime minister tells people that liberal Jewish financier George Soros is out to get him. And there are plenty of false beliefs that, while not conspiracy theories, may be much more damaging – substantial numbers of Americans believe, for example, that more than half of the federal budget goes toward paying interest on the national debt. (It does not.)