I started searching for information to account for the causes of his brain tumor, which eventually led me down a dark internet rabbit hole. Perhaps there were chemicals at his job that caused the tumor, I thought. One of his 30-year-old coworkers had died of cancer several years prior. That seemed weird, didn't it? And now Mike with this brain tumor? When I mentioned this to his doctors, they pointed out that for a company of more than 300 employees, these numbers were far below average.

What about environmental carcinogens, then? I thought. We had recently moved to a new neighborhood near the site of an old diaper company that was in need of environmental remediation for spilled "chlorinated solvents and heating oil" from the 1970s and '80s. That seemed bad and probably had adverse effects, I thought. But Mike had started showing symptoms of the tumor just three weeks after we moved in, and the doctors explained that craniopharyngiomas don't appear that fast. It had likely been present in Mike's brain for years, maybe decades.

Each time I landed on a possible culprit, my anger reenergized me. Instead of making me feel hopeless, it gave me a target and suggested there might be some action I could take. If it were from his work or from an old factory site, maybe I could file a lawsuit. Maybe I could launch an investigation or trigger some media exposé. If I could just find the right person or thing to blame, I could get some justice. Or vengeance. Or ... maybe just a sense of control.

In 2001, social psychologists Jennifer Lerner and Dacher Keltner studied how anger and fear have very different effects on how we think about ourselves and our world. Their research found that feelings of anger (compared to fear) are associated with increased feelings of certainty, control, and optimism. Especially when people contemplate "ambiguous events" -- such as having a heart attack at a young age or being unable to find a job -- anger translates into higher perceptions of control. Once anger triggers feelings of control, feelings of optimism follow.

This is why identifying someone to blame for Mike's tumor gave me the focus and will to stop crying and get out of bed. Instead of wallowing in grief, I became a warrior furiously charging in a precise direction. My anger invigorated me; it lifted me up out of the sea of muck we were stuck in.

Under conditions of uncertainty, information that helps direct our negative emotions toward a target is psychologically comforting. When we feel powerless in a situation that is both complex and overwhelming, the identification of people and institutions to "blame" feels good to us.

This explains not only families lashing out when their loved ones are ill, but also the appeal of conspiracy theories more broadly. Especially in the context of ambiguous and terrible events like 9/11 or the Sandy Hook shooting, conspiracy theories increase perceptions of control. Such narratives typically point to the existence of secret plots by powerful actors working behind the scenes, either to cause the horrible chaos or to fabricate it. The anger we then feel toward these "powerful actors" is accompanied by a feeling of efficacy (confidence in one's ability to effectively navigate the world), hence increasing the likelihood that we will take action -- by engaging in political participation, protest, or, in the case of a loved one's medical situation, maybe filing a lawsuit.

On the far right, the racist conspiracy theory known as birtherism has faded into the background. The reactionary movement has moved on to new nefarious myths, including the QAnon miasma and claims that Dr. Anthony Fauci is using the coronavirus pandemic to undermine Donald Trump's presidency.

But journalist Adam Serwer, in a piece for The Atlantic this week, stresses that the importance of birtherism to the right wing goes way beyond their disdain for Obama -- it is part of a broader ideology of white nationalism and white supremacy. And the prominence of conspiracy theories features in other articles published this week by the Atlantic, including one by Jefferey Goldberg and another by Adrienne LaFrance.

"Birtherism is the baseless conjecture that the 44th president of the United States not only was born abroad and was therefore, ineligible for the presidency, but also, was a secret Muslim planning to undermine America from within," Serwer explains. "It is the combination of these two elements that transformed birtherism from mere false speculation about Obama's birth to a statement of values about who belongs in America and who does not."

According to Serwer, it is a mistake to think that birtherism was strictly about Obama. It was a celebration of white supremacist and white nationalist ideology in general, and Trump continued to embrace birtherism even when he quit questioning the legitimacy of Obama's birth certificate.

"Birtherism was a statement of values, a way to express allegiance to a particular notion of American identity -- one that became the central theme of the Trump campaign itself: to Make America Great Again, to turn back the clock to an era where white political and cultural hegemony was unthreatened by black people, by immigrants, by people of a different faith," Serwer writes. "By people like Barack Obama. The calls to disavow birtherism missed the point: Trump's entire campaign was birtherism."

Trump, according to Serwer, doesn't have to talk about Obama's birth certificate in order to promote birtherism in 2020 -- his whole presidency has been one big assertion of birtherism.