To figure out who might be a follower of the unhinged conspiracy movement QAnon, researchers might look at a person’s religious beliefs, or their devotion to Donald Trump, or even their belief in other conspiracy theories.

And while all of these can be indicators of a predilection to believing in QAnon, the single best predictor is which TV news station you watch, with those who favor right-wing sources up to nine times more likely to believe in the conspiracy than those who trust mainstream broadcast network news.

That’s the finding of a new survey from the Washington-based Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), which surveyed over 5,500 adults in all 50 states over a two week period in early March.

Nationally, the survey found that a whopping 15% of Americans—roughly 31 million people—believed in the completely unfounded claim that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”

The figure jumped to 20%—or 42 million Americans—for the less outlandish, but still baseless, claim that “there is […]