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On March 26, in the middle of the night, an enormous container ship—the MV Dali—lost power. Slowly, excruciatingly, it drifted toward the towering steel piers of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, moving slightly faster than a brisk walking pace. But force is mass times acceleration, and the MV Dali weighed at least 220 million pounds—more than 50,000 cars. Even at a snail’s pace, it was a wrecker. The bridge buckled. Six men died.
No hidden saboteur or shadowy agent of darkness caused this tragedy, just fallible electricity, a technology that sometimes breaks. Safeguards, such as routine inspections and a backup generator, failed to prevent a poorly timed accident, because even carefully regulated environments remain subject to some degree of chaos and randomness.
Don’t try to tell that to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the avatar of the MAGA movement. While rescue operations were still under way, she couldn’t resist insinuating a hidden hand: “Is this an intentional attack or an accident?” She eagerly played the role of queen conspiracist, and her like-minded subjects were legion. Perhaps the captain of the ship had been incapacitated by a COVID-19 vaccine. Or maybe President Joe Biden was really behind it, damaging the American economy and taking out a crucial bridge for … unknown reasons. Conspiracy-theory TikTok videos sprouted up and garnered millions of views; some suggested that Barack Obama was the secret architect of the bridge collapse, or that it was an attempt to distract attention from the recent federal raid on the home of Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Then, last Friday, an earthquake struck the Eastern Seaboard, its epicenter near Tewksbury, New Jersey. That such an unusual event would occur within mere days of a total solar eclipse visible across much of the United States was just too much of a coincidence for MTG: “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.”
Greene didn’t mention that God’s message, if it had been sent from above, seemed to be aimed at Donald Trump himself, because ground zero for the earthquake was just a few miles from the closest thing to a gilded shrine in the MAGA movement: the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Nor did she mention that astronomers can predict, with astonishing accuracy, the next time that God will apparently admonish the faithful through a total solar eclipse: at 3:34 p.m. UTC on August 12, 2026. (Those who must repent next will apparently be the notorious heathens of Greenland, where the eclipse will most easily be viewed.)
The notion that “everything happens for a reason” isn’t just a false mantra of comfort to stitch on flowery pillows; it’s also a central delusion of the MAGA movement, a fun-house-mirror reflection of reality as a world of perfect, top-down control, in which random accidents never happen and everything has significant, hidden meaning if you only dare to look closely enough.
Conspiratorial thought is an innate feature of human cognition, arguably an inadvertent by-product of evolution. Natural selection shaped the human brain to navigate the world by inferring cause and effect. The impulse is so ingrained that when patients have their corpus callosum severed, making communication between the two hemispheres of the brain impossible, the left hemisphere simply invents plausible explanations to account for inputs to the right side of the brain that the left side hasn’t seen. When no reasons are to be found, we automatically make them up.
For hundreds of thousands of years, Homo sapiens were hunter-gatherers. If someone heard a rustling in the grass and stayed put because they assumed it was just a harmless gust of wind, but it turned out to be a lurking saber-toothed tiger, they might die. Conversely, if the rustling was caused by a gust of wind, but the person ran away for fear of a lurking, hungry cat, they might waste a bit of energy, but they would survive.
Human brains therefore adapted to a world in which false positives were annoying, but false negatives were deadly. As a result, our minds are pattern-detection machines, fine-tuned to underestimate randomness. Countless psychology experiments showcase this innate characteristic of cognition. Humanity makes sense of the world through narratives that inscribe clear-cut reasons onto subjective experience. We are, to borrow a phrase from the American literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall, a “storytelling animal.”
The problem, as Gottschall points out in The Story Paradox, is that conspiracy theories make exceptional stories. QAnon is deranged, delusional fiction, but if Hollywood had invented it, it would be a blockbuster thriller. A sinister satanic conspiracy at the highest levels of power? Fetch the buttered popcorn.
Conspiracy theories are difficult to debunk precisely because a thrilling story is more cognitively compelling than no story. Once we see it, we can’t unsee it, much as in a children’s connect-the-dots drawing, seemingly random blobs of ink become a dinosaur, and then the image comes to appear inevitable. Similarly, the magic trick of detectives in mystery novels, such as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, is to fit seemingly random details together like a perfect jigsaw, with no extra pieces left over. Now, on social media, thousands upon thousands of self-proclaimed Poirots search for hidden connections where none exist. Sometimes, they can put enough pieces together to form a superficially plausible image that captivates millions.
The real world is messy. Most events don’t fit together like a jigsaw. Container ships sometimes knock down bridges in freak accidents. The moon blots out the sun completely, on average, every 18 months, though its visible location on Earth varies wildly. Earthquakes may be fully explainable by the science of plate tectonics, but we’re incapable of predicting them, so it feels significant when New Jersey shakes rather than California.
Yet the human mind was forged, through relentless evolutionary pressures, to navigate a less complex world. Growling saber-toothed cats presented our ancestors with a fairly straightforward pattern of cause and effect—at least compared with the intricacies of globally interconnected economics and politics, which allow the people of one country to be instantly affected by a terrorist attack in another or by a single infection in a distant, unknown city. But the cognitive habits inherited from that simpler time yield something I call “magnitude bias,” in which we wrongly assume that major events must have major causes, never small or arbitrary ones. A bridge collapse must have a hidden hand, a nefarious purpose behind it, not something so banal as a technical failure.
I’ve argued in these pages and in my book that the modern world is particularly prone to being upended by small, random perturbations. In the name of efficiency and optimization, we’ve eliminated slack in our systems, such that a small change—a mutated virus, for example—can produce catastrophic effects globally. Magnitude bias makes those flukes catnip to conspiracists. Something must be going on is the mantra that energizes swaths of the internet, where citizen sleuths admonish the sheep who fail to “do their own research.”
Conspiracists, including those in the MAGA movement, from Trump and Greene downward, tend to share two defining traits. First, they are likely to have a Manichean worldview, such that they interpret events around them as a showdown between good and evil, with no third option. If something appears neutral or arbitrary, that can only be because one hasn’t seen the hidden truth. This trait is particularly pronounced among evangelicals in the United States, who have inherited the outlook from thousands of years of Christian thinkers. As the literary theorist Terry Eagleton observed: “For Augustine and Dante, the world is a sacred text whose apparently accidental signs are to be deciphered as revelations of divinity.”
The second trait, called “collective narcissism,” is a belief that one’s group is exceptional in some way, with access to special knowledge, while the rest of the world is full of chumps stuck outside, looking in. The Trump movement has cleverly tapped into this psychology, not just by ridiculing the mainstream media as the purveyor of lies to the foolish masses, but also by promoting markers of special identity, such as symbolic hats, QAnon T-shirts, and even secret hand symbols. This trait, too, can dovetail with religious belief, particularly for communities—such as evangelical Christian nationalists—that see themselves as having been chosen by God, in this case working with God through Trump.
The Trumpian conspiracists share a fantasy world of perfect top-down control, where every event—no matter how arbitrary or random—can be chalked up to the machinations of a secret villain, most often with a covert tentacle outstretched from the “Biden regime.” Government officials are deemed simultaneously too inept to manage, say, health-care administration, and omnipotent enough to execute a complex global conspiracy involving a cabal of thousands without any mistakes or leaks. (Call it “Schrodinger’s Bureaucrat.”)
A bridge was felled by a tragic error. Earth’s tectonic plates moved slightly underneath New Jersey. And on Monday, for four minutes, the sun went dark. These are mystifying events with rational explanations. Unfortunately, the MAGA movement has discovered its own hidden truth: that lying to people, coddling mass delusions, and insisting that political enemies are part of a secret plot is an effective strategy that converts ordinary supporters into zealous disciples. The only effective way to break the spell and bring people back to reality will be to disprove their most important prophecy, which takes place at the polls in November.
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