It's Brian Lehrer, and this is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, May 15th.

On March 9th, an influential conspiracy theorist who goes by the initial cue and apparently has President Trump's

ear, issued some ominous social media posts that said the coronavirus was real, not a hoax,

but it was welcome, and his followers should not be afraid. That sounds pretty fringy, right?

And very few Americans actually believe it,

of course, but in the context of today's politics, Q is a player. Conspiracy theories with no

plausible explanations necessary seem to abound maybe more than ever. And here's the thing. They

have the ear of the President of

the United States in a surprising number of cases and sometimes preoccupied the highest office in

the land in the middle of a pandemic. Joining me now to talk about how conspiracy theories are

appealing to a growing number of Americans and how and why the president often amplifies them

is Adrian LaFrance, executive editor of the Atlantic.

Adrian, welcome back to WNYC.

Thank you for doing this.

Thanks for having me.

So Q and his base called QAnon, for people who don't already know it,

have come to define a worldview which subscribes the idea

that the elite, especially Democrats, are puppet masters of American society with nefarious intentions.

Can you give us more details of what they believe about that?

That's right. So this may sound familiar to those who remember Pizza Gate, but the idea is that there

is this cabal of elites that is secretly torturing children and they're working in concert

with the quote unquote deep state and that Trump is the savior who will ultimately thwart them.

...