Caroline ’s Reviews > The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging > Status Update

"Sometimes all you can do is try to get the conspiracist to focus on the real world and spend less time online. Researchers have shown that activities and goals that give conspiracists a real-world focus can help to break the spell. When conspiracists are focused on real-life objectives, outside their online circles, those groups and conspiracies begin to matter less to them. Most people prefer [BELOW]

It's significant that both women the author profiled lived through repeated traumatic events in childhood and are socially isolated and adrift. The last two traits in particular create a trap: These attracted them to a toxic combination of New Age beliefs and conspiracy theories (a combo dubbed "conspirituality" here) in the first place. Then, conspirituality circles [BELOW]

I wanted to read this book to learn about the rise of conspiratorial thinking among women in general, but the “women” of the subtitle is deceptive. Instead this book profiles two deeply troubled (and frighteningly uneducated) women who enthusiastically assaulted police officers and trespassed inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. Their humanizing, heartrending backstories offer [BELOW]