Beth Macy

I tell you where I think he turned was he was a practicing Catholic and pretty active in his church and his deacon in the church had taken him out after hearing that Bill was going to vote not for Hillary, but for Jill Stein and said, well, you might as well vote for Trump.

And then.

He thought they were going out for beer.

So he felt like really ambushed and all of his friends were giving him a hard time.

And he just basically sequestered himself online after that.

And as I'm reporting on this book, then the Springfield story breaks out.

And lo and behold, Bill, my ex, becomes the lead spokesman for the anti-Haitian contingent in Springfield, Ohio, which is where he lived.

It's about 18 miles from Urbana.

And that was shocking, too.

It was like, there he is on PBS NewsHour.

There he is on Blaze TV.

And, you know, I think the last communication I had from him, he was espousing, you know, great replacement theory beliefs and being really, really rude to me.

And I decided not to really engage with him anymore.

Oh, yeah.

They all said – it was like they all got together and decided we're going to say the election of 2020 was fishy and that the people who perpetrated the January 6th storming of the Capitol were really Antifa.

And –

You know, a woman I met who worked in the economic development office said she had to quit her church because everybody just assumed that the election was rigged and that everybody thought the same way she did.

And in Urbana, three out of four people did vote for Trump.

And I don't think everybody who voted for him is that far down the conspiracy rabbit holes, but it was a lot more people than I thought.

It was surprising as well.