QAnon explained: the antisemitic conspiracy
theory gaining traction around the world
The visibility of the online movement has surged as a
supporter appears headed to Congress and Trump fails to debunk claims
Julia
Carrie Wong in San Francisco
@juliacarriew
Email
Tue 25 Aug
2020 20.36 BSTLast modified on Wed 26 Aug 2020 00.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/25/qanon-conspiracy-theory-explained-trump-what-is
To Donald
Trump, it’s “people who love our country”. To the FBI, it’s a potential
domestic terror threat. And to you or anyone else who has logged on to Facebook
in recent months, it may just be a friend or family member who has started to
show an alarming interest in child trafficking, the “cabal”, or conspiracy
theories about Bill Gates and the coronavirus.
This is
QAnon, a wide-ranging and baseless internet conspiracy theory that reached the
American mainstream in August. The movement has been festering on the fringes
of rightwing internet communities for years, but its visibility has exploded in
recent months amid the social unrest and uncertainty of the coronavirus
pandemic.
Now, a
QAnon supporter is probably heading to the US Congress, the president (who
plays a crucial role in QAnon’s false narrative) has refused to debunk and
disavow it, and the successful hijacking of the #SaveTheChildren hashtag has
provided the movement a more palatable banner under which to stage real-life
recruiting events and manipulate local news coverage.
Here’s our
guide to what you need to know about QAnon.
So what is
QAnon?
“QAnon” is
a baseless internet conspiracy theory whose followers believe that a cabal of
Satan-worshipping Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and billionaires runs the
world while engaging in pedophilia, human trafficking and the harvesting of a
supposedly life-extending chemical from the blood of abused children. QAnon
followers believe that Donald Trump is waging a secret battle against this
cabal and its “deep state” collaborators to expose the malefactors and send
them all to Guantánamo Bay.
There are
many, many threads of the QAnon narrative, all as far-fetched and evidence-free
as the rest, including subplots that focus on John F Kennedy Jr being alive (he
isn’t), the Rothschild family controlling all the banks (they don’t) and
children being sold through the website of the furniture retailer Wayfair (they
aren’t). Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, George Soros, Bill Gates, Tom Hanks,
Oprah Winfrey, Chrissy Teigen and Pope Francis are just some of the people whom
QAnon followers have cast as villains in their alternative reality.
This all
sounds familiar. Haven’t we seen this before?
Yes. QAnon
has its roots in previously established conspiracy theories, some relatively
new and some a millennium old.
The
contemporary antecedent is Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that went viral
during the 2016 presidential campaign when rightwing news outlets and
influencers promoted the baseless idea that references to food and a popular
Washington DC pizza restaurant in the stolen emails of Clinton campaign manager
John Podesta were actually a secret code for a child trafficking ring. The
theory touched off serious harassment of the restaurant and its employees,
culminating in a December 2016 shooting by a man who had travelled to the
restaurant believing there were children there in need of rescue.
QAnon
evolved out of Pizzagate and includes many of the same basic characters and
plotlines without the easily disprovable specifics. But QAnon also has its
roots in much older antisemitic conspiracy theories. The idea of the
all-powerful, world-ruling cabal comes straight out of the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, a fake document purporting to expose a Jewish plot to control
the world that was used throughout the 20th century to justify antisemitism.
Another QAnon canard – the idea that members of the cabal extract the chemical
adrenochrome from the blood of their child victims and ingest it to extend
their lives – is a modern remix of the age-old antisemitic blood libel.
How did
QAnon start?
On 28
October 2017, “Q” emerged from the primordial swamp of the internet on the
message board 4chan with a post in which he confidently asserted that Hillary
Clinton’s “extradition” was “already in motion” and her arrest imminent. In
subsequent posts – there have been more than 4,000 so far – Q established his
legend as a government insider with top security clearance who knew the truth
about the secret struggle for power between Trump and the “deep state”.
Though
posting anonymously, Q uses a “trip code” that allows followers to distinguish
his posts from those of other anonymous users (known as “anons”). Q switched
from posting on 4chan to posting on 8chan in November 2017, went silent for
several months after 8chan shut down in August 2019, and eventually re-emerged
on a new website established by 8chan’s owner, 8kun.
Q’s posts
are cryptic and elliptical. They often consist of a long string of leading
questions designed to guide readers toward discovering the “truth” for
themselves through “research”. As with Clinton’s supposed “extradition”, Q has
consistently made predictions that failed to come to pass, but true believers
tend to simply adapt their narratives to account for inconsistencies.
For close
followers of QAnon, the posts (or “drops”) contain “crumbs” of intelligence
that they “bake” into “proofs”. For “bakers”, QAnon is both a fun hobby and a
deadly serious calling. It’s a kind of participatory internet scavenger hunt
with incredibly high stakes and a ready-made community of fellow adherents.
How do you
go from anonymous posts on 4chan to a full-fledged conspiracy movement?
Not by
accident, that’s for sure. Anonymous internet posters who claim to have access
to secret information are fairly common, and they usually disappear once people
lose interest or realize they are being fooled. (Liberal versions of this
phenomenon were rampant during the early months of the Trump administration
when dozens of Twitter accounts claiming to be controlled by “rogue” employees
of federal agencies went viral.)
QAnon
supporters await the arrival of Donald Trump for a rally at Mohegan Sun Arena
in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 2018. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty
Images
QAnon might
have faded away as well, were it not for the dedicated work of three conspiracy
theorists who latched on to it at the very beginning and translated it into a
digestible narrative for mainstream social media networks. A 2018 investigation
by NBC News uncovered how this trio worked together to promote and profit off
QAnon, turning it into the broad, multi-platform internet phenomenon that it is
today. There now exists an entire QAnon media ecosystem, with enormous amounts
of video content, memes, e-books, chatrooms, and more, all designed to snare
the interest of potential recruits, then draw them “down the rabbit hole” and
into QAnon’s alternate reality.
How many
people believe in QAnon? And who are they?
Nobody
knows, but we think it’s fair to say at least 100,000 people.
Experts in
conspiracy theories point out that belief in QAnon is far from common. While at
one point, 80% of Americans believed a conspiracy theory about the Kennedy
assassination, a poll by Pew Research in March found that 76% of Americans had
never heard of QAnon and just 3% knew “a lot” about it.
The largest
Facebook groups dedicated to QAnon had approximately 200,000 members in them
before Facebook banned them in mid-August. When Twitter took similar action
against QAnon accounts in July, it limited features for approximately 150,000
accounts. In June, a Q drop that contained a link to a year-old Guardian
article resulted in approximately 150,000 page views over the next 24 hours.
These are
rough figures to draw a conclusion from, but in the absence of better data,
they hint at the scale of the online movement.
In general,
QAnon appears to be most popular among older Republicans and evangelical
Christians. There are subcultures within QAnon for people who approach studying
Q drops in a manner similar to Bible study. Other followers appear to have come
to QAnon from New Age spiritual movements, from more traditional conspiracy
theory communities, or from the far right. Since adulation for Trump is a
prerequisite, it is almost exclusively a conservative movement, though the
#SaveTheChildren campaign is helping it make inroads among non-Trump supporters
(see below).
QAnon has
spread to Latin America and Europe, where it appears to be catching on among
certain far-right movements.
Why does
QAnon matter?
First,
there’s the threat of violence. For those who truly believe that powerful
figures are holding children hostage in order to exploit them sexually or for
their blood, taking action to stop the abuse can seem like a moral imperative.
While most QAnon followers will not engage in violence, many already have, or
have attempted to, which is why the FBI has identified the movement as a
potential domestic terror threat. Participation in QAnon also often involves
vicious online harassment campaigns against perceived enemies, which can have
serious consequences for the targets.
QAnon is
also gaining traction as a political force in the Republican party, which could
have real and damaging effects on American democracy. Media Matters has
compiled a list of 77 candidates for congressional seats who have indicated
support for QAnon and at least one of them, Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene,
will in all likelihood be elected in November.
As the hero
of the overall narrative, Trump has the unique ability to influence QAnon
believers. On 19 August, at a White House press briefing, he was given the
opportunity to debunk the theory once and for all. Instead, he praised QAnon
followers as patriots and appeared to affirm the central premise of the belief,
saying: “If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it; I’m
willing to put myself out there, and we are, actually. We’re saving the world
from a radical left philosophy that will destroy this country and, when this
country is gone, the rest of the world will follow.”
QAnon
believers were jubilant.
Didn’t you
mention #SaveTheChildren? What’s that all about?
Participating
in QAnon is largely made up of “research” – ie learning more about the
byzantine theories or decoding Q drops – and evangelism. Most of the
proselytization relies on media manipulation tactics designed to catch users’
attention and send them into a controlled online media environment where they
will become “redpilled” through consuming pro-QAnon content.
QAnon
followers have for years used a wide range of online tactics to achieve
virality and garner mainstream media coverage, including making “documentaries”
full of misinformation, hijacking trending hashtags with QAnon messaging,
showing up at Trump rallies with Q signs, or running for elected office.
A very
potent iteration of this tactic emerged this summer with the #SaveTheChildren
or #SaveOurChildren campaign. The innocuous sounding hashtag, which had
previously been used by anti-child-trafficking NGOs, has been flooded with
emotive content by QAnon adherents hinting at the broader QAnon narrative. (It
doesn’t help that the debate around human trafficking is already full of bogus
statistics.)
On
Facebook, anxiety over children due to the coronavirus pandemic, a resurgent anti-vaxx
movement, and QAnon-fueled scaremongering about child trafficking have all
combined to inspire a modern-day moral panic, somewhat akin to the “Satanic
Panic” of the 1980s.
Hundreds of
real-life “Save Our Children” protests have been organized on Facebook in
communities across the US (and around the world). These small rallies are in
turn driving local news coverage by outlets who don’t realize that by
publishing news designed to “raise awareness” about child trafficking, they are
encouraging their readers or viewers to head to the internet, where a search
for “save our children” could send them straight down the QAnon rabbit hole.
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