Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves. . . . Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.
—Gunman Stephen Paddock, three weeks before opening fire on a country music festival in Las Vegas, according to an informant
I used to be a “normal” American guy—I went to school, I got a good job, I had a house, a car, I used to love “stuff” . . . and I had everything: the electronic toys, the clothes, the gadgets, and all the accessories. I used to love movies: I had a massive movie collection. I used to love music: I had hundreds of gigs of music. I have a stack of concert ticket stubs and tons of concert T-shirts. My yard and house were very respectable, I spent time and money landscaping. I watched the news. I had debates with coworkers and family members about politics. I even had hobbies: coin collecting, woodworking, mountain biking, and surfing. I used to put on my good suit and go to church on Sunday and talk with all the other people there. I saw my career as a path toward upward mobility. I played politics in the company. I worked overtime. I got in good with the boss. I climbed the corporate ladder.
But, then, I started to really get into Conspiracy Theory (back like in 2012/2013). I went DEEP down the rabbit hole and came out the other side. I wanted to know EVERYTHING! I did days and weeks of research. I immersed myself completely. In 2016 I jumped into Pizzagate research with both feet. I devoured everything there was to know. Then, in 2017, I hopped on the QAnon bandwagon and went even deeper.
Something changed inside of me. I woke up! I no longer saw the world as I used to. I quit my job. I sold my stuff. I’ve downsized my entire life. I’ve been living off my savings for a few years now. I no longer see a point in participating in the “real” (fake) world. I know that everything I see is a lie. Everything that I’ve ever known is a lie. My whole world has been nothing but one giant lie from the start, and I can see that clearly now. So why bother? What is the point of perpetuating the corrupt system by playing along. Why bother pretending that anything matters? I have myself set up in a good situation financially. I spend very little money and I grow a lot of my own food. My expenses are minimal. I may never have to work again. I can just live on the bare minimum and avoid the fake world altogether.
The only people that I actually hang out and talk to are people who know the truth. I can’t even interact with people who still believe the fake world is real. I just can’t do it. Basically, I can no longer function in the fake real world. It pains me to play along with some stupid game that I know is fake. Now all I do is sit around here (and various other conspiracy forums) and look for news of “The Event.” I’m waiting for that one trigger event that will end this whole corrupt system. I keep watching and waiting and praying. Maybe it will be a huge war? Maybe it will be a financial collapse? Maybe it will be some external event (aliens)? Either way, we’re on the edge of the cliff and looking down into the abyss. It’s only a matter of time before this whole thing blows up and ends.
Until then, I’m just going to drop out and mind my own business. I’m going to wait and learn as much as I can. Someday, when it all comes crashing down, a huge weight will be lifted off my shoulders and I will finally get to exist in the real world again.
Does anyone else feel this way?
—Anonymous contributor at Voat.com, an Internet message board, October 2018
They call it “getting red-pilled.” We all know the metaphor, the one from The Matrix: Morpheus holds out his hands to reveal two small pills: “You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Like the hypercool hero Neo in the films, true believers in the alternative universe of conspiracy theories are absolutely convinced that the epistemological bubble into which they have submerged themselves is the real reality.
The problem, of course, is that their version of reality isn’t based in facts, sound evidence, or even logical reasoning, but rather is a complex farrago of conjecture, false facts and evidence, wild-eyed paranoia, and sociopathic authoritarianism. Rather than giving people who think they have “taken the red pill” a clear-eyed view of the world as it really is, conspiracism actually creates a crackpot version of reality in which the world is secretly run by a cabal of scheming Jewish globalists who control both the banks and the media, in which their planned one-world government is intent on disarming private citizens and putting them in concentration camps and in which Muslims work in cahoots with Marxists to destroy Western civilization.
It used to be that such people were few in number and mostly relegated to the fringes of society, their theories and claims the frequent source of amusement for some people. Now, the leading conspiracy theorists have audiences numbering in the millions, and their views are shared not just with the audiences on mainstream right-wing cable shows, but also by the president of the United States and members of his administration.
And it is killing us, both metaphorically and literally. Conspiracism is much of the fuel that feeds the rise of the radical right both in the United States and around the world, and its toxic effects on our communities and our democracy will be felt for many years to come. It feeds the scapegoating, fear, and eliminationism that in turn are the foundations of hate crimes and acts of domestic terrorism. More precisely, it has played an outsized role in fueling gun-related violence, particularly mass shootings: nearly every gun rampage in which large numbers of people have been killed in recent years has been perpetrated by men who have been radicalized on Internet forums devoted to conspiracy theories. Perhaps the most notorious of these was the mass shooter in Las Vegas in October 2017, who killed 58 people and injured another 851, driven by a belief in a government plot to take away Americans’ guns.
This is where the very far end of the “red-pilled” spectrum reaches its apotheosis. The young people (mostly male) consumed by this radicalization call this “black-pilling”: a bleakly nihilistic mindset in which the world’s doom is seen as inevitable. The system is too rotten, the global environment poised for catastrophe, everything is too far gone. So violence becomes not just excusable, but a way of going out, paradoxically, with some kind of meaning, even if it’s just the “score” you can roll up in a mass murder, glorified among your fellow trolls at 4chan and Reddit who have, horrifically, “gamified” these killings.1
Eventually, the online participants in all this “pilling” have evolved a whole pharmacopeia of variously colored pills that radicalize in different ways:
The conspiracism innate to “red-pilling” is toxic on a personal and familial level, too. It affects interpersonal relationships when friends and family members refuse to clamber down the rabbit hole with them, since their refusal not only makes them, in the eyes of those who have swallowed it, certain sheep-like pawns in the vast conspiracy they see, but even potential conspirators. As the phenomenon spreads, thousands of families are being torn apart by the anger and fear the conspiracist industry generates, sometimes with fatal consequences.
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Lane Davis’s favorite song in high school, according to his senior yearbook, was “Loser.” It seems fitting. The rest of his inscription featured offbeat aphorisms—“In the time of monkeys I was a chimpanzee” (a line from the Beck song), “Getting needles stuck through me and steel implanted,” “Anywhere in life, make the best outta the situation. Keep it real while maintaining the front”—suggesting alienation and someone ill at social ease.
Blond with soft, heavy features, Davis looked large in these photos but really wasn’t. He wasn’t athletic, didn’t play football like a lot of guys in rural Skagit County, Washington, where he grew up. Thumbing through the 2002 Burlington-Edison High Tinas Coma, you can spot him here and there but mostly lurking on the fringes—in the debate team room, posing with a Speedy Gonzales figure, looking skeptical and painfully hip in his senior photo.
He and his family—mom, dad, brother, and sister—lived out in the sticks, on Samish Island, which actually ceased being an island sometime in the early twentieth century when local landowners built a system of dikes that created a permanent causeway between the island and the mainland, so people drive on and off it across the main road at any time. But it is part of a cultural landscape populated with island communities, ferries, boats, and wildlife. Getting to high school each day entailed a thirty-minute drive across delta farmland.
Lane’s dad, Charles “Chuck” Davis, was an attorney known around the community as “Mr. Samish Island.” He organized all kinds of community activities, including sailing activities that taught young people how to handle a boat. He and his wife, Catherine, were pillars of the community, and their home was centrally located on a curve overlooking Samish Bay.3 Their daughter Allison and son Peter were both considered bright, outgoing, pleasant young people. Their son Lane, not so much. He was, as polite Northwesterners put it, “difficult.” Surly. Harsh. Highly intelligent and contemptuous of others around him.
When Lane graduated, he enrolled at the university on the other side of the state, Washington State, in the rolling Palouse farmland and began studying physics.4 He washed out after only a year or so, though. After that he wandered quite a bit, career-wise. He worked in the software world around the Seattle/Redmond area for a few years, but nothing ever stuck. In 2009, though, he began finding his future: online.
That was the year Lane first popped up on YouTube under the nom de plume Seattle4Truth.5 His first few videos were dabblings in health-related conspiracy theories, as well as Davis’s theories about physics, which he eventually published on a dubious-science website called The General Science Journal. Titled “Quantum Cold-Case Mysteries Revisited,” it was a series of ruminations on quantum physics that were, in fact, regurgitated and utterly discredited theories about perpetual motion. For most of the first year or so online, Lane’s video output was along similar niche crackpot lines.
But then he began spreading out, creating videos that became increasingly imbued in far-right conspiracism. One video claimed the Oklahoma City bombing was a false flag, while another “exposed” the hoary conspiracy by the Jewish Rothschild family to control world banking and government. The 9/11 attacks were an insider “false flag” event. People who consume public drinking water are dosing themselves with mind-controlling lithium. In a media market where such videos were as common as seagulls at a fisherman’s wharf, Lane’s videos didn’t make much of a mark.
He made his living by working at an aluminum smelter in Ferndale, an hour’s drive from Samish Island, where he told friends he made a six-figure salary. He had a place of his own near Bellingham during those years but kept making videos. When he was laid off in 2014, he had to move back to Samish Island, where he took up a wing of his parents’ home and tried figuring out other ways to make a splash online.
He struck online gold, finally, in 2015 with an epic three-hour-twenty-minute pastiche about the so-called Gamergate controversy, titled “#Gamergate: Actually, It’s about . . .” Comprised mostly of clips arguing that discussions and seminars within the computer gaming corporations and the larger design community were part of a larger plot by “cultural Marxists” to make video games less “masculine”—that is, less structured around first-person-shooter architecture—as part of a larger globalist scheme to emasculate young white males.
Not only was it a massive hit, it brought him to the attention of some of the gods of the Gamergate world, particularly Breitbart News’ tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who since 2012 had been generating an entire career as a political provocateur out of the toxic cauldron of that online controversy. Ostensibly a debate over the ethics of online-gaming journalism, in the fever swamps of Internet message boards, video chat rooms, and news comments sections, it turned mostly into an attack on feminists, especially those in the game-design community, featuring threats and at-home harassment and “doxxing,” in which all of your personal information—your address, your Social Security number, everything—is published online for everyone in the world to see. It also became a recruiting ground for white nationalists and neo-Nazis and played an essential role in generating what became known as the “alt-right.”
Davis’s Gamergate video came to Yiannopolous’s attention after he was adopted by a kind of feeder blog called The Ralph Retort, which specialized in right-wing conspiracism. Ethan Ralph, the site’s founder and editor, began running Davis’s videos and posts along with effusive praise for his “insanely good” research skills. He gave him the title of “senior political analyst” and wrote that “The things he’s saying are true” and praised his “tireless efforts” and for being “proven right again.”
Yiannopoulos snapped him up in late 2015 and added him to his “Project Milo” team. Davis worked as a speechwriter and ghostwriter on Milo’s autobiography, Dangerous, the winter and spring of 2016. The problem was that Milo wasn’t paying him. He wasn’t paying anyone, for that matter; much of his organization was actually being operated by “volunteers” who were happy to be in his orbit and perform work for no pay.6 At least, Milo seemed to think they were happy. Lane Davis wasn’t. He asked Milo for a paying position in February. He got turned down. So in March, he handed a pile of emails to a BuzzFeed reporter, Joseph Bernstein, who turned them into a story exposing how Yiannopoulos was running a scam operation that ripped off the people working for him.
Milo did manage to land Davis a job at the right-wing Capital Research Center, praising him as “One of my most gifted researchers. Total autodidact . . . hugely smart.”
Davis wrote a piece attacking the MacArthur Foundation that was published in May 2017 under a joint Yiannopoulos-Davis byline titled “MacArthur’s Thought Police: A Foundation Helps Twitter and Other Social Media Enforce Left-Wing Ideology.”
By then, however, Davis had moved on. Working more feverishly than ever for The Ralph Retort, he began pouring out videos focusing on the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theory, as well as a handful of associated conspiracies. One of these turned up at Alex Jones’s Infowars website under a Ralph Retort byline (headlined “Big Brother: Top Soros Henchman Calls for Government-Run Social Media in Order to Stop Infowars and Breitbart”) in May also. This meant he was rising steadily within the conspiracy theory ecosystem.
He had become increasingly obsessed with the conspiracy theory that there was a global pedophilia ring operating out of Washington and Hollywood that was the underpinning of the Pizzagate claims, which were predicated on emails stolen from Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in 2016.7 (Theorists claim that some of the emails contained secret code words indicating that there were children being held in a dungeon in a D.C. pizza parlor. In December 2016, one of the believers in these theories walked into that restaurant with an AR-15 and fired some rounds into a closet door he believed would reveal the opening to the dungeon rather than the janitorial supplies it contained.)
Lane often veered into violent, threatening language when discussing the supposed pedophilia ring. In a three-way video conversation with fellow Ralph Retort participants, he became enraged when one of them opined that same-sex restrooms were harmless. Lane accused him of hoping to spy on young girls in public facilities.
“Pedo Marxist piece of shit!” Lane screamed. “I’ll stab your bitch ass if I ever see you.”
Summer was getting into full swing on Samish Island, but Lane spent most of his time on his computer, creating and posting videos, nearly all of them variations on the Pizzagate theories, including a related theory that the unsolved death of a DNC staff member named Seth Rich was part of the lethal coverup of the pedophilia ring. Lane also posted a video arguing that all progressives and liberals were participants in the global pedophilia phenomenon.
“But what if I were to tell you that pedophilia is a basic tenet of the progressive ideology? You think hyperbole?” he told his audience. “Let’s look to Germany, where the modern progressive ideology based on social sciences has its roots. In 2010, Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper published a three-part series on ‘The Sexual Revolution in Children.’ Part 1 was titled, ‘How the Left Took Things Too Far.’ Quote: ‘Germany’s left has its own tales of abuse. One of the goals of the German 1968 movement was the sexual liberation of children. For some time, this meant overcoming all sexual inhibitions, creating a climate in which even pedophilia was considered progressive.’ . . . They felt they were doing nothing wrong, it was just scientific, progressive social science.”8
There was a growing contempt and anger in his voice. He was primed and ready to explode.