People who choose to believe in outlandish, violent conspiracy theories aren't victims. They aren't brainwashed. Every one of them has encountered countervailing opinions & evidence to the contrary, often from loved ones, and chose to discount them. At every turn, they had agency

I think we've entered an era in which people can curate their reality in unprecedented ways and ordinarily pay very little penalty for rejecting the basic grounds of a shared world. Ideas of 'cult' and 'brainwashing' do not really comprehend this.

I remember the religion scholar Wendy Doniger comparing two theories of myth: the structural, in which myth is hardwired to the brain; and the historical, in which myth can be traced genetically through its transmission.

The question, she said, was not why myths in different societies are similar. But rather why aren't they identical? She suggested we need to attend to why certain myths take root in certain places at a given time. To what aspects of that social formation do they concretely speak?

Rather than look at conspiracy theories as "mass delusions" or "brainwashing" which must be cured or deprogrammed (to what? regular conservatism? liberalism?) we might think of them as myths. They speak to a world that has grown opaque.