Introduction to QAnon from the NY TIMES
(my editing included to fit the blog but not change the original context). The following is a rather long post, but timely and needed today:
Haven’t there always been far-fetched conspiracy theories about powerful elites? It’s true that much of QAnon’s subject matter is recycled from earlier conspiracy theories, and is rooted in anti-Semitic tropes that date back centuries.
But QAnon is fundamentally an internet-based movement that operates
in a different way, and at a different scale, than anything we’ve seen before.
QAnon is deeply participatory in a way that few other
popular conspiracy theories have been. Followers congregate online to decode
the latest Q posts, discuss their theories about the news of the day, and bond
with their fellow believers. The Atlantic has called it “the birth of a
new religion.”
There’s also the basic danger of what QAnon followers actually believe. It’s one thing to have a polarized political discourse with heated disagreements; it’s another to have millions of Americans who think, with complete sincerity, that the leaders of the opposition party are kidnapping and cannibalizing innocent children.
Combine those violent, paranoid
fantasies with the fact that QAnon followers have been charged with committing serious crimes in Q’s name, and it’s
no wonder people are worried.
What is QAnon? QAnon is the umbrella term for a set of internet conspiracy theories that allege, falsely, that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
QAnon followers believe that this cabal
includes top Democrats like President Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama,
and George Soros, as well as a number of entertainers and Hollywood celebrities
like Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, and Ellen DeGeneres and religious figures
including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama.
Many of them also believe that, in addition to molesting
children, members of this group kill and eat their victims to extract a
life-extending chemical called *adrenochrome.
*Note: Adrenochrome is not used
as a recreational drug, it is not
obtained by extraction from human bodies.
There's no evidence anyone
in Hollywood has tried using it as a recreational drug, and there don't seem to
be any children who have had their body chemicals extracted. About the only
thing that's true is that adrenochrome is a real chemical. It's the metabolic
byproduct of the hormone adrenaline (also called epinephrine), produced as your
body uses adrenaline.
Presumably this is why the
children have to be tortured first: to get their bodies producing adrenaline.
According to QAnon lore, former President Trump was
recruited by top military generals to run for president in 2016 to break up
this criminal conspiracy and bring its members to justice. Many of these cabal
members will soon be arrested, the theory goes, and some will be imprisoned at
Guantánamo Bay, while others will face military tribunals and be executed.
Is that all? Not by a long shot. Since it began,
QAnon has incorporated elements of many other conspiracy theory communities,
including claims about the assassination of JFK, the existence of UFOs, and the
9/11 “truther” movement.
QAnon Anonymous, a podcast about the QAnon movement, calls QAnon a “big tent conspiracy theory”
because it is constantly evolving and adding new features and claims. But the
existence of a global pedophile cabal is the core tenet of QAnon, and the one
that most, if not all, of its followers believe.
Since the 2020 election, QAnon has also become a stronghold
of support for the false theory that the election
was stolen from Mr. Trump. Some QAnon believers maintain that he is
still the lawful president, although some have reluctantly accepted the reality that he is not.
How did this all start? In October 2017, a post
appeared on 4chan, the notoriously toxic message board, from an anonymous
account calling itself “Q Clearance Patriot.” This poster, who became known
simply as “Q,” claimed to be a high-ranking government insider with access to
classified information about Trump’s war against the global cabal.
Q predicted that this war would soon culminate
in “The Storm” — an appointed time when Trump would finally unmask the cabal,
punish its members for their crimes and restore America to greatness.
Why is it called The Storm? It’s a reference to
a cryptic remark that Trump made during an October 2017 Photo Op.
While posing alongside military generals, Trump said: “You guys know what this
represents? Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.”
How many people believe in QAnon? It’s hard to say,
because there’s no official membership directory, but the number is not small
and is probably in the millions.
1. Facebook moved to block QAnon content, some
popular QAnon groups on the platform had hundreds of thousands of members,
and NBC News reported last year on an internal
Facebook study that found thousands of QAnon pages and groups operating on the
social network, with millions of members between them.
2. Twitter removed more than 70,000 QAnon-affiliated accounts after the
Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
3. YouTube removed some videos explaining the
tenets of QAnon garnered millions of views before they were taken down last year.
4. And that’s just the content that is explicitly
pro-QAnon.
There are likely millions more people who believe in
QAnon-related conspiracy theories, like the “Save the Children” movement that
erupted in 2020 after QAnon believers hijacked a hashtag campaign for a legitimate anti-trafficking
organization and turned it into a recruiting drive that introduced millions of
people to QAnon theories.
Who believes in QAnon? It’s a more diverse group than
you might imagine.
The earliest adherents were mainly far-right Trump
supporters, but in 2020, the movement expanded its reach to include
health-conscious yoga moms, anti-lockdown libertarians, and evangelical
Christians.
Unlike the stereotypes of extremist movements, QAnon doesn’t appear to be primarily dominated by
young men, or people experiencing economic pain.
There are Harvard graduates and Wall Street executives who believe in it, as
well as people with less elite pedigrees.
QAnon has also developed an international presence, and has been embraced by conspiracy theorists and far-right extremists in countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan.
Is QAnon the same thing as Pizzagate? Yes and no.
QAnon has been described as a “big-budget sequel” to
Pizzagate, because it takes the original Pizzagate
conspiracy theory — which alleged, falsely, that Hillary Clinton and
her cronies were operating a child sex-trafficking ring out of the basement of
a popular Washington, DC pizza restaurant (NOTE: That building doesn’t even
have a basement), and then they add many layers of narrative on top of that.
But many people believe in both theories, and for many QAnon believers,
Pizzagate was a kind of gateway to the larger world of right-wing conspiracy
theories.
One new element in QAnon is a number of clear and specific
predictions about when and how “The Storm” would play out. For years, Q has
predicted that mass arrests of cabal members would occur on certain days that
certain government reports would reveal the cabal’s misdeeds and that Trump
would coast to a landslide re-election. None of those predictions came true.
But most QAnon believers didn’t care. They simply found ways to reframe the
narrative and ignore the discrepancies, and moved on.
Why are some people attracted to the QAnon movement? A
common misconception is that QAnon is purely a political movement. But it
functions, for people who believe in it, as both a social community and a
source of entertainment.
Some people have compared QAnon to a massive multiplayer
online game, because of the way it invites participants to co-create a kind of
shared reality filled with recurring characters, shifting story lines and
intricate puzzle-solving quests.
QAnon has also been compared to a church, in that it provides its
followers with a social support structure as well as an organizing narrative
for their everyday lives.
Adrian Hon, a game designer who has written about QAnon’s
similarity to alternate-reality games, says that believers “open a fascinating fantasy world of
secret wars and cabals and Hillary Clinton controlling things, and it offers
convenient explanations for things that feel inexplicable or wrong about the
world.”
What role have social networks played in QAnon’s
popularity? Even though Q’s posts appear on fringe message boards, the
QAnon phenomenon owes much of its popularity to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube,
which have amplified QAnon messages and recommended QAnon groups and pages to new
people through their algorithms.
1. In recent months, many leading social networks
have taken steps to ban QAnon content from their services, citing the theory’s
potential for offline harm.
2. In October, Facebook and YouTube both announced wide-ranging QAnon bans, and removed
thousands of accounts, pages, and channels from their platforms.
3. Twitter has banned thousands of QAnon accounts
for engaging in coordinated harassment.
4. And several smaller platforms, such as Etsy,
Pinterest, and Discord, have also taken steps to limit QAnon’s influence.
How did QAnon believers respond to Trump’s election loss?
Trump is the central and heroic
figure in QAnon’s core narrative — the brave patriot who was chosen to save
America from the global cabal. As a result, most QAnon believers expected that
he would easily win re-election, and spend his second term vanquishing the
“deep state” and bringing the satanic pedophiles to justice.
After Trump’s election loss in November, many believers rallied behind the false QAnon theory that
the election was stolen from him. Many expected that on Inauguration Day, Trump
would not actually leave office as scheduled but would declare martial law,
announce mass arrests of Democrats and stop Biden from taking office.
When that didn’t happen, many QAnon believers grew disillusioned, and some even realized they had been duped.
But others continued to believe that “The Storm” was still approaching, and
maintained that Trump was still planning a triumphant comeback.
My 2 cents: I hope his
helps many people understand who and what QAnon is and what they stand for and advocate,
and just how dangerous their rumor and conspiracy spreading lies truly are.
Thanks for stopping by.
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