Since the rise of QAnon, much has been made of “conspirituality,” the alchemical process that turns new-age thinking into MAGA-inflected conspiracy theories. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a better analysis than Frederick Kaufman’s profile of Jacob Angeli-Chansley, better known as “the QAnon Shaman” from everyone’s favorite 2021 insurrection. By mapping Angeli-Chansley’s personal brew of beliefs to the (surprisingly woo) history of science, Kaufman teases out a discomfiting truth dating back to Isaac Newton himself.
With this intellectual lineage, conspiracy theorists are not about to back down from their truths, because their own scientific method possesses a historical claim as deeply entrenched as ours. And they have a point: their spooky correspondences, their spheres of influence, their invisible forces, their gravities and their magnetisms, their parsing of the invisible effluvia—without these, there never would have been any science at all. And that’s the reason reason has yet to dent the citadel of MAGA, and never will.
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