Rise: Conclusion

This movement has traced how radicalisation takes shape through the ordinary infrastructures of social life. What became known as QAnon did not appear suddenly or from nowhere; it grew within familiar systems of connection that gradually reshaped how people saw and felt the world. Politics, media, digital platforms, and crisis together created a moral and emotional environment in which suspicion felt reasonable, anger virtuous, and belonging inseparable from belief. Rise shows that radicalisation is not a private conversion but a collective process sustained through the networks, institutions, and meanings that organise everyday life.

Across the chapters in this movement, the constitutive architecture of radicalisation took form. Political permission created moral space for resentment. Partisan media turned that permission into routine through repetition. Social media amplified it by tying belief to intimacy and recognition. The pandemic accelerated it by collapsing the boundaries between private and public life. Everyday interpretation then helped people explain and endure it. Each dynamic was relational and interdependent, built from emotions that are not in themselves extreme (trust, care, loyalty, fear, and grief) but that were reorganised within moral worlds rewarding certainty and exclusion.