Before the pandemic hit, Adam Enders, an assistant professor at the University of Louisville who researches how conspiracy theories affect politics, had already noted that conspiracy thinking was becoming increasingly weaponized for political purposes. “Entrepreneurial politicians have realized that they can tap into these conspiratorial, populist sentiments that can be activated: ‘I know you feel this way. Let me remind you that you feel this way. And then let me connect that to important things that are happening, like this upcoming vote, or this policy,’” Enders told me.

Then, the coronavirus pandemic helped fuel a new and troubling pandemic of misinformation.

“This pandemic is ripe ground for conspiracy theories, precisely because a lot of the psychological elements that give rise to conspiracy theories are heightened: powerlessness and anxiety and uncertainty,” Enders says. “In the middle of a pandemic, all we have is anxiety. It stems from uncertainty: What’s actually happening? When is this gonna be over? When will we have a vaccine? How are things going to work when states start opening?”

Research into conspiracy theories has found no innate correlation between conspiracy thinking and left-right political orientation. “But conspiratorial thinking can be pulled in one direction or another; it can be harnessed,” Enders says. “And that’s exactly what we’re seeing. Strategic politicians can cue conspiratorial thinking.”

In the misinformation pandemic, conspiracy theories occupy an increasingly commonplace part of mainstream political discourse, political leaders weaponize them for their partisan benefit, and neutral, trusted sources of information lose sway. Like a virus, once a conspiracy theory starts spreading, it is difficult to contain. “What’s a trusted source for somebody who is literally defined by thinking that everyone and everything is a lie and against them and a conspiracy?” Enders asks. Where once political leaders provided fact-based messaging grounded in a sense of responsibility and aimed at informing the public, the incentive to act responsibly has withered. And with no end to the coronavirus pandemic in sight—and a world-changing election coming in November—you can expect the misinformation pandemic to continue.

To sort through all of this, I spoke with Enders twice—once in April, and again earlier this week. A transcript of those conversations is below, combined and lightly edited for clarity and length.

Zack Stanton: These are politically charged times. We have mass demonstrations following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and coming out of them, many different conspiracy theories and misinformation. There were false claims that there was an internet blackout in Washington, D.C., to prevent protesters from posting online. President Trump baselessly accused Martin Gugino, the 75-year-old nonviolent protester from Buffalo, of being an “Antifa provocateur,” and said that it was a “set up” when police pushed him to the ground and fractured his skull. And, by the way, we’re also in the middle of a global pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 Americans. Is a time like this sort of a perfect storm for conspiracy theories?

Adam Enders: This pandemic is ripe ground for conspiracy theories, precisely because a lot of the psychological elements that give rise to conspiracy theories are heightened: powerlessness and anxiety and uncertainty. Those things aren’t gone, and now we’ve added this extra source of anxiety for some people, where things are starting to open up, but people don’t know if they should be going downtown, or when their businesses will reopen or if they’ll even make it. Anxiety and all these different psychological states that have to do with anxiety are important predictors of conspiracy beliefs. And in the middle of a pandemic, all we have is anxiety. It stems from uncertainty: What’s actually happening? When is this gonna be over? When will we have a vaccine? How are things going to work when states start opening? There’s lots of uncertainty, and it makes people anxious and helpless. So, we’re sandwiching pandemic anxieties with [individuals’] other anxieties that aren’t inherently partisan, but that can be pulled into the partisan political fray.

We’re also bringing in race. We pretty regularly see that conspiracy theories about anti-Semitism are this toxic blend of conspiracy thinking, some other psychological stuff, and racial and religious considerations. So [in the wake of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations], I think we’re going to see that, as well. The pandemic is happening. “Law and order” is pretty polarizing. All of this is compounding the anxieties that are already there. We’ve got all the regular conspiracy motivations. And now we’re adding in race.

Stanton: There are at least three major conspiracy theories about the pandemic that come to mind: that the coronavirus was spread deliberately; that the pandemic is overexaggerated in an attempt to hurt President Trump’s reelection; that this whole thing was some sort of bioweapon created in a Chinese lab. How widespread are coronavirus conspiracy theories?

Enders: The polling I and some of my colleagues have done has shown somewhere around 30 percent of the American mass public believe in some coronavirus conspiracy theory, including the ones that that you just mentioned.

Stanton: Some people are motivated to believe or spread conspiracy theories for partisan reasons. And others come to it driven less by ideology than “conspiracy thinking.” Can you describe that?

Enders: The idea behind “conspiracy thinking” is that people have this general predisposition, to some extent, to naturally interpret information and events as products of conspiracies. Conspiracy thinking is a continuum. That’s the right way to think about this. The label of “conspiracy theorist” dichotomizes the world into conspiracy theorists and non-conspiracy theorists. What does it take to be a “conspiracy theorist”? To have some level of doubt about one conspiracy theory out there? Well, we might as well not even make the distinction, because we’re all on the wrong side of that on one thing or another.

We’re all on a conspiracy-thinking continuum. The really high end is problematic: Fringe groups weaponizing conspiracy theories to ramp up their bases for whatever purposes they have. But really low on the spectrum might be bad, as well: People who uncritically accept everything and believe that, you know, politicians are always telling the truth. Once we think about conspiracy thinking on a continuum, there’s more nuance.

Stanton: You’ve noted that the conspiracy theories seem to be an ever-more-frequent part of mainstream political culture. Why do you think that is?

Enders: Increasingly, entrepreneurial politicians have realized that they can tap into these conspiratorial, populist sentiments that can be activated: I know you feel this way. Let me remind you that you feel this way. And then let me connect that to important things that are happening, like this upcoming vote, or this policy that the other party is trying to shove down your throat.

Conspiratorial orientations really have nothing to do, innately, with ideology. We find no correlation between conspiracy thinking and ideology or left-right orientations. But conspiratorial thinking can be pulled in one direction or another; it can be harnessed. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing. Strategic politicians can cue conspiratorial thinking. And by virtue of you being the person with the D or R by your name and directing the conspiracy theory towards some group, you’re pulling conspiratorial notions into this more familiar left-right partisan political space.

Stanton: Do you have a sense when that changed? On some level, conspiracy theories have always been part of American politics — obviously, there are examples like Joseph McCarthy, or the Oval Office tapes of Nixon railing against Jews in the government. But this seems a little different.

Enders: If we’re talking about general levels of belief in conspiracy theories, things probably aren’t that different today than the past. By the mid-1970s, something like 80 percent of people believed in some form of the John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. That’s a lot of people — and there was no internet. Same thing with all sorts of alien and UFO conspiracy theories: Really high proportions of people believed those things before they had the internet and social media to spread them. A lot of these narratives about social media starting conspiracy theories or promoting them — the notion that “Facebook has blood on its hands” — these kinds of assertions imply that we’re lemmings, and that we’re just surfing the web and nobody is heeding the saying, “Don’t believe everything you see on in the internet.” But the reality is that we believe in these things for reasons. Something is attractive about conspiracy theories that draws you to them. And it’s not because you’re crazy, and it’s not because you’re a blank canvas that believes whatever the next thing is that’s put in front of you.

This is where partisan polarization and tribalism come into the mix: As parties increasingly fight over a small slice of voters who are uncommitted, there’s just so much at stake in electoral competition that you’ll grasp at anything, whereas maybe that wasn’t as true 20 years ago. What you’re describing, where it seems like there are many more blatantly partisan conspiracy theories out there — that’s probably true. And I think that’s a consequence of politicians explicitly weaponizing them and trying to cue these conspiratorial sentiments that people have.

Stanton: In a study from a few years ago, you took a conspiracy theory and presented it to two different groups of Republicans. With one group, you included a line in the conspiracy theory that essentially said Democrats were part of the conspiracy; with the other group, that line wasn’t included. And you found that Republicans were more likely to believe a conspiracy theory when it was blamed on Democrats — and I should note, the reverse was also true: Democrats were more likely to believe a conspiracy theory when it was pinned on Republicans. How much of people embracing conspiracy theories is about partisan motivation?

Enders: A lot of the psychological ingredients of conspiracy beliefs, we all have to some extent. Partisanship, to my mind, is sometimes weaponized to provide that last straw that breaks the camel’s back and edges you into a conspiracy belief. This is where it’s really important to think carefully about the actual motivations, because you’re right: Some of these conspiracy theories are not really emanating from psychological, conspiracy thinking-esque sources; they’re just partisan mudslinging.

Stanton: In preparation for this interview, I thought through some of the different conspiracy theories President Trump has embraced in one way or another. You can look at “Obamagate,” or blaming coronavirus on China, or talking about the “Deep State,” or that there were millions of fraudulent votes for Hillary Clinton. Central to his arrival in national politics, of course, is the “birther” conspiracy theory. Even before he was in politics, he said vaccines were causing autism, and that the movement to get asbestos taken out of buildings was led by the Mafia.

Enders: And that Ted Cruz’s dad killed JFK.

Stanton: Right. But what’s strange to me is that conspiracy theories are often so associated with people who aren’t in power — they’re believed by outsiders who accuse those in power or inside the establishment of conspiring to do something awful. But Donald Trump is the president of the United States. He’s literally the most powerful man in the world. How do you think through all this? And given his embrace of conspiracy theories before he entered politics, does that suggest that he approaches conspiracy theories driven less by partisan motivated reasoning than by conspiracy thinking?

Enders: As a political scientist, it’s hard to impute what people believe and why. We start with the assumption that all behavior is strategic. We observe some behavior and then wonder, ‘Why would they do that?’ — and that’s especially so with conspiracy theories and Donald Trump, because he just keeps trafficking in them. It seems — and this might be charitable at this point — like there’s some strategy behind this. But it is interesting that he was like this before he was elected — and he’s never not been a powerful person. Sometimes, we’ll observe higher levels of conspiracy beliefs among low-status groups — that could be low socioeconomic status, it could be racial and ethnic minority groups or religious minority groups — because it’s a way of explaining why you can’t get ahead in the world. And sometimes that’s totally legitimate. But Donald Trump doesn’t fit any of that. So, I don’t want to go as far as saying that I suspect he probably does actually believe some of these things, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Stanton: If they function as signals — as ways to show allegiance to one side or the other, or to assert your identity — how do you go about trying to correct or combat a conspiracy theory when it’s tied to something so personal for the person who believes in it, when it seems tied to their identity?

Enders: If that’s true, it’s gonna be really hard to confront somebody — especially somebody you’re not particularly close to — and say, “That’s wrong.” That degenerates pretty quickly into, “I have my facts and you have your facts.”

Correcting conspiracy beliefs is really tricky. You have prevention, which is just trying to mitigate the spread of them in the first place. But private companies [like social media platforms] can basically do whatever they want, and they have no real incentive to do that. It’s hard for them, and some of those posts generate a lot of clicks. But also, First Amendment concerns are all tied up into that, and your YouTubes and Facebooks and Twitters are going to be hesitant to do that for a number of reasons. There’s also pre-bunking, which is trying to get ahead of a conspiracy theory and say, “A lot of people are talking about this now, but it has problems X, Y and Z with it. You’ll encounter this at some point, and it’s bogus.” And then on the back end, we have treatment: “OK, you’ve been exposed to this and were motivated to believe it. How can we make you not believe that anymore?” For the most part, that comes in the form of giving people corrective information that has factual content from trusted sources. An easy fix to what feels like an influx of partisan conspiracy theories is for politicians to just not repeat them, and instead check them out in a technical kind of way. Easy, right? But they’re not going to do that, because they now know how potent and useful it is.

Stanton: It’s almost as though there’s a conspiracy-theory pandemic: You can try to mitigate and prevent the spread of a conspiracy theory, but after it spreads to a certain degree, it’s difficult to contain.

Enders: Yeah, it’s very difficult to contain afterwards if people have decided they believe this. And it’s even harder when there aren’t actually good answers. We don’t know where this strain of coronavirus came from. We might never know. And it’s easy to say, “Well, this is a bioweapon,” or “This isn’t that bad and is being strategically exaggerated.”

Stanton: I feel like this is something that parts of the media struggle with: It’s difficult to cover the fact that a leader is spreading a conspiracy theory without somehow being complicit in amplifying those theories. And at the same time, if a conspiracy theory has partisan overtones, it’s almost like people see a correction as having partisan overtones, too. So how do you go about navigating that? Is there a way to avoid being seen as a partisan?

Enders: Probably not. The thing is, if your own ideological identities motivate you to believe a conspiracy theory, you’re not necessarily an extremist, but you are a partisan, and you probably think of yourself as a liberal or conservative. So, if that’s true, when you see corrections, how do you interpret them? You already see the world as in-group vs. out-group, us vs. them; whenever anyone says anything bad about your in-group, you take that very personally. There’s probably not a good way to avoid that.

That said, party leaders trying to correct misinformation is still one of our strongest options. If you’re motivated to believe the conspiracy theory because of partisanship, then we know you will buy into what trusted elites are saying. But if you’re motivated more by just these deep-seated conspiratorial sentiments, that’s a lot harder to correct, because you don’t trust anything. What’s a trusted source for somebody who is literally defined by thinking that everyone and everything is a lie and against them and a conspiracy?

Stanton: How do you differentiate between conspiracy theories and misinformation or disinformation?

Enders: This is an important point and a really difficult epistemological issue. Defining “conspiracy theory” is tricky. Most of us that do this work, you have to sort of believe that truth exists on a continuum to even be able to cobble together a reasonable definition of “conspiracy theory” that doesn’t accidentally either encompass everything or mean nothing. I think the same is sort of true for “misinformation.” The thing that links these two together is that they are “truth” claims, and we have to define what “truth” is in order to really properly classify them. Conspiracy theories have more parameters to them than misinformation: You have this small, nefarious group that is working against the rest of us and has the power to do so. Misinformation doesn’t necessarily require those things, though I think, for the most part, we assume that somebody creating misinformation probably belongs to one of those nefarious groups, or something like that. But that’s really not true for a lot of people who share misinformation; they’re just spreading what they believe, irrespective of who necessarily created the meme or what. So, conspiracy thinking, conspiracy theories are sort of a subset of misinformation.

Stanton: Given that we are in a pandemic and anxieties are high, and that makes people perhaps more prone to be attracted to conspiracy thinking, if the coronavirus pandemic lasts for several more months — as most experts suggest — and perhaps even gets worse in the fall, do you see the rise of conspiracy theories tracing that same trajectory?

Enders: It’s tricky. I think that most of these predispositions are relatively stable. And the question is, what cues them? What activates them? What inflames them? And then, even further, what not merely does those things, but connects these conspiracy theories to behaviors, to political choices that people could be making, say, in the voting booth or something along those lines? So, if the pandemic continues and people continue to get sick and die, and the economic situation continues as it has been or worsens, then, in the short term, people are going to continue to put some stock in coronavirus conspiracy theories, and more are going to pop up.

Stanton: Final question: How does a conspiracy theory end? Does it just die out, or does it never die?

Enders: The only way that I can think of that they truly end is that we find evidence for it, and then we just call it a conspiracy. Watergate was a conspiracy theory until it wasn’t. And there are things like that throughout American history: CIA mind-control initiatives, like MKUltra; people speculated about that for years, and it turns out the CIA was totally trying to do that. To my mind, that’s the most definitive end for a conspiracy theory.

But this also points to why conspiracy theories are such interesting devices: They’re ill-defined. They’re nebulous. There’s no amount of evidence, in some people’s minds, that you could ever bring to bear on a question to make them disbelieve in a particular conspiracy theory, because every new piece of evidence is part of the conspiracy. So, if we’re talking about people on the reasonably high end of the conspiracy thinking spectrum, for them, there’s never an end.