When podcaster/journalist Stephanie Kemmerer proposed our cover article on QAnon, I knew little about the phenomenon except for occasional mentions. Once she researched, reported, and submitted it (she interviewed former QAnon followers, and her article by then had expanded to a two-part series), I read the result, “Life, the Quniverse, and Everything,” in disturbed amazement. “Red-pilled,” “black-pilling,” “Q Drops,” “Q crumbs,” “8chan,” QAnon aggregator sites—a whole new vocabulary of modern unreality. This loose assemblage of the world’s most virulent conspiracy theories is a creation of our own times, an ill society. Yet in another way, it is as old as human nature. She notes that QAnon draws upon ancient hateful tropes and anti-Semitic themes going back past the origins of Nazi fascism, the Blood Libel Myth, and the tactic of declaring one’s enemies Satanists. What’s especially scary is, she points out, followers consider themselves heroes—and victims.

And, as we saw in horror on January 6, many QAnon followers were among the hordes who violently invaded the Capitol of the United States to try to stop the Constitutional certification of the duly elected next president. But QAnon is just one of many hate groups fueled by conspiratorial thinking and irrational beliefs, and we needn’t elevate it to any mythic status over all others. The extreme elements among them have now shown they pose a threat to democracy and civilized society.

Everything we scientific skeptics at the Skeptical Inquirer and elsewhere have studied and warned about for decades—irrationality, delusions, detachment from reality, magical thinking, wishful thinking, misinformation and disinformation, the inability (or unwillingness) to distinguish facts from myth, the strong denial of validated knowledge, the creation and spreading of wild conspiracy theories—have been on painful public display for all of us to witness.

Carl Sagan warned us about this a quarter century ago. In a 1994 CSICOP keynote address and January/February 1995 Skeptical Inquirer cover article, he expressed a “foreboding” he had for a future time when “our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what’s true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.”

But he was ultimately an optimist (his title was “Wonder and Skepticism”), and we all have to have hope—hope that the wiser leaders of both parties can find ways to heal our wounds and restore calm and civility. The successful January 20 inauguration, the new president’s healing words and appeals to facts and truth—and the same from three past presidents (from both parties)—are all cause for optimism. In the meantime, science goes on. Scientific discoveries going back years brought the record-quick creation and testing of three vaccines against COVID-19 that may soon bring an end to that scourge. Science is one place where we can always find human progress. We celebrate its achievements and truth-finding processes. (Richard Dawkins’s fine essay in this issue enlarges on that theme.)

We scientific skeptics share in that scientific spirit. At the same time, we apply scientific thinking, critical thinking, and skeptical inquiry to the whole arena of wayward ideas and popular claims deserving well-informed skeptical scrutiny. This issue of Skeptical Inquirer is filled with relevant examples.

—Kendrick Frazier