At the end of 2016, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, The Oxford English Dictionary made “post-truth” its word of the year, Merriam-Webster picked “surreal,” and Dictionary.com chose “xenophobia.” Loath to put too fine a point on it, the American Dialect Society went with “dumpster fire.” At least in recent times, official words of the year have tried to capture the political and social anxieties of their moment, and the ascent of Trump—a onetime birther who espoused noxious falsehoods about immigrants, appeared brazenly unconcerned with ethical boundaries, and openly associated with the notorious conspiracist and Infowars founder Alex Jones—seemed to portend the entry of once-fringe ideologies into the mainstream.

Much like their candidate, many of Trump’s most visible and fervent supporters, drawn largely from the nativist right wing, were disposed to wild conspiracy theories. The election year saw the explosion of Pizzagate, the theory that Democratic Party officials (along with the artist Marina Abramovic) were operating a child sex trafficking ring out of an unassuming pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C. From Pizzagate developed QAnon, whose proponents