Lonely conspiracists

In her debut work, Noelle Cook offers a window into the world of something that many of us are fortunate enough not to have heard of but which we cannot afford to ignore: conspirituality. Scholars Charlotte Ward and David Voas coined this term to describe a worldview that Cook describes as “a blend of New Age religion, anti-vaccination advocacy, and anti-­government extremism, all mixed with various right-wing conspiracy theories and heaping spoonfuls of antisemitism and white supremacy.”

In an attempt to understand what drives so many middle-­aged White women into conspiracism and leads them to act on their beliefs in violent ways, Cook, an ethnographer, followed two January 6 insurrectionists from different parts of the country, Tammy and Yvonne, for four years. What she learned from them makes up the bulk of The Conspiracists.

What Cook discovered in her conversations with Tammy and Yvonne does not surprise me since I work with children’s services: Both women had incredibly traumatic childhoods that primed them for troubled relationships and social disconnection as adults. When the COVID pandemic devastated their social networks, which were already tenuous, they each fell headfirst into a growing culture of online conspiracies blended with New Age ideas.