At a recent Trump rally in Ohio, ominous music played under the former president’s speech as the crowd simultaneously raised their index fingers in the air. To people in the know, rally-qanon-music.html">the music sounded identical to the QAnon theme song, and it elicited the conspiracy theory salute. It also signaled Trump’s overt embrace of the conspiracy theory and its supporters.

Journalist MIKE ROTHSCHILD writes in a book on QAnon that the conspiracy theory is no longer a “cool, secret club that you had speak the jargon to have a chance of getting into” and instead has become mainstream “conservatism.” Rothschild is the author of The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and the Conspiracy Theory of Everything. We’ll talk with him about why QAnon caught on and spread so effectively, who believes this far-out conspiracy theory and why, and the threat it poses to democracy.