During the rally trump held in Tampa, his supporters wore t-shirts with “QAnon” on them. this is a reference to the latest conspiracy theory, favored by trump supporters, which says that an official in military intelligence circles-know simply as Q- is feeding everyone “information,” through the social networks 4chan and Reddit (favorites of right-wing extremists),  of a fight between trump, Robert Mueller, and the military brass on one side, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, Hollywood liberals, billion-dollar corporations, the “deep state,” and a child sex-trafficking ring on the other; that Mueller is not really targeting trump, but has secretly indited the Clintons. This idea all began in 2016, when a gunman raided and shot up a pizza parlor in Washington, thinking it was the center of a child sex slave ring.

Conspiracy theories have a long and sorted history in this country; our own “President” was a leader of the “birther” conspiracy theory, that Barrack Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya. There have been conspiracy theories centered around Jews, the Catholic Church, and Communists (with some overlap between them). Added to this is the decades-long conservative campaign against the mainstream news media for not “reporting” the news according to their bias, and so the followers of trump and his cronies have to get their “news” from some other source, other than a reliable news organization, in order to make any sense of what goes on in the world.