Scott Wiener
'The difference is QAnon': how a conspiratorial
hate campaign upended California politics
QAnon
A lawmaker’s LGBTQ+ bill led to antisemitic attacks
calling him a pedophile: ‘The GOP has been infected by QAnon’
Julia
Carrie Wong
@juliacarriew
Email
Wed 16 Sep
2020 11.00 BSTLast modified on Wed 16 Sep 2020 11.01 BST
Catie
Stewart was on her way home from a vacation in early August when her phone
reconnected to cell service and she realized something was wrong. As the
communications director for Scott Wiener, a California state senator, Stewart
manages her boss’s Instagram account, a task that usually involves responding
to a handful of messages each day. But while Stewart had been out of cellphone
range, a bill authored by Wiener had become the target of a misinformation and
harassment campaign by activists who oppose coronavirus public health measures
and followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
“FUCKING
FILTH. BLOW YOUR HEAD OFF,” read one representative message that accused Wiener
of “creating a law to allow pedophiles to be charged on a lesser degree”.
Others fantasized about dragging Wiener’s body behind a car until he died,
accused him of worshipping “Moloch”, or declared an intention to find and kill
him. One meme posted on Instagram featured an image of Wiener photoshopped to
enlarge his nose and add sidelocks, a yarmulke and a Jewish prayer shawl. Over
the next month, Stewart and Wiener were left to confront a constant digital
onslaught of death threats, homophobia, antisemitism and baseless allegations
of pedophilia.
“I didn’t
know what QAnon was a month ago, and it’s totally changed my life,” Stewart
said in an interview.
In some
ways, what happened with SB145 is a local story about the politics involved in
updating California’s outdated legal codes. But it also serves as a cautionary
tale for the future of political debates in the US as the QAnon conspiracy
movement grows and Republican party leaders do little or nothing to stop it.
QAnon
followers believe, without evidence, that that the world is run by a secret
cabal of Satan-worshipping Democrats and Hollywood celebrities who are engaged
in wide-scale child trafficking, pedophilia and cannibalism. A national
politics infected by QAnon is wholly incompatible with the evidence-based
debate and compromises required to govern any society. Within QAnon there is no
room for nuance or rationality; there is only good vs evil, and any
disagreement with QAnon dogma is evidence of abject depravity in the form of
child murder.
And yet, in
recent weeks, Donald Trump has praised QAnon followers, a QAnon-backing
candidate has all but assured her election to Congress in November, and the
#SaveTheChildren hashtag campaign has introduced QAnon to millions of potential
new recruits. On 15 September, Trump retweeted a statement that appeared to
accuse Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, of pedophilia.
“The
Republican party has been deeply infected by QAnon,” Wiener told the Guardian.
“We’ve seen this kind of mass political infection before, all the way back to
the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism. Unfortunately, there are always going
to be opportunistic politicians who sense that there are people who think this
and jump at the chance to get political support. It’s shameful, but it’s
reality, and that’s what’s happening with QAnon.
“We’re
seeing it from the president. We’re seeing it from a couple of my Republican
colleagues. We need to push back hard.”
Creating a
false narrative
The battle
over SB145 was always going to be politically tricky due to its sensitive
subject matter: sex offender registries. But Wiener, a 50-year-old gay Democrat
from San Francisco, says that representing the city renowned for its liberal
politics and large LGBTQ+ community carries with it “an obligation to take on
the hard progressive bills that not all members [of the legislature] can take
on”. In 2017, he authored a bill that completely overhauled the sex offender
registry, and in 2019, he took on another, more modest problem with the
registries.
Wiener’s
proposed law dealt with people who are convicted of having non-forcible sex
with minors above the age of 14 and who are themselves no more than 10 years
older than the minor. Judges in such cases were able to exercise discretion
when deciding whether or not to place a convicted offender on the registry if
the sex act was penile-vaginal sex but not if it was anal or oral sex or
non-penile sexual penetration. The bizarre status quo stemmed from a 2015
California supreme court ruling which reasoned that if the victim in such a
case became pregnant, placing the offender on the registry would make it harder
for them to provide for the child.
To Wiener,
this inequity was part of the legacy of the criminalization of LGBTQ+ people.
“It used to be much more explicit and obvious in terms of anti-sodomy laws,” he
said. “This is one example where the judge can keep straight kids off the
registry, but the gay kids have to go on the registry. It’s mortifying that in
2020, in California, this discrimination continues to exist in our penal code.”
SB145 was,
essentially, a clean-up bill that would allow judges to exercise discretion in
all such cases, regardless of the sex act involved. It did not change the
criminality of sex with a minor (which remains illegal) nor did it change the
criminal penalties for breaking the law. The bill was introduced in January
2019 and had the official support of LGBTQ+ groups, prosecutors, police chiefs,
public defenders, civil liberties groups, and advocates for survivors of sexual
assault.
Nevertheless,
it quickly attracted some negative attention. A conservative online news
outlet, the California Globe, began covering it closely, with headlines that
cast it as a “bill to protect sex offenders who lure minors”. A factual article
by FoxNews.com actually tamped things down substantially by explaining the
controversy and the true aim of the bill, Wiener recalled.
A bigger
setback came when the Democratic assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, a staunch
progressive, argued that the 10-year age gap in the bill was too large. She
delayed a final vote on the bill, pushing it on to the 2020 legislative agenda.
The delay
left the bill “hanging out there for a year”, Wiener said, where, like
legislative fly paper, it continued to catch bad-faith attacks. One such attack
came in January 2020, when the website Law Enforcement Today (LET) published an
inflammatory article headlined: “California lawmakers introduce bill to protect
pedophiles who sexually abuse innocent kids”. “If you’re a pedophile and want
to rape sweet, innocent, young children, then California is the state for you,”
the piece began, before blatantly mischaracterizing the provisions in the bill.
The LET
article performed well on the outlet’s Facebook page, garnering more than
10,000 shares in January. But it really took off in late July, when it was
reposted by LET’s Facebook page, just as a highly effective rebranding campaign
by QAnon evangelists was catching fire on Instagram and Facebook under the twin
hashtags #SaveTheChildren and #SaveOurChildren.
While
“classic” QAnon memes and content are aggressively pro-Trump, militaristic, and
often include blatantly antisemitic tropes and references, #SaveOurChildren has
provided QAnon with a decidedly softer aesthetic and rhetorical appeal.
Rather than
enticing new recruits with the promise to unveil military intelligence secrets
about the supposed evils of the Clintons and Obamas, #SaveOurChildren captures
attention with exaggerated statistics about the prevalence of child sex
trafficking, then draws susceptible readers down the rabbit hole of
increasingly implausible falsehoods. It’s a softer, gentler “red pill” than
traditional QAnon material, but the result – blatantly false beliefs about
Democrats sexually abusing children in order to extract a life-extending
chemical from their blood – remains the same.
The
#SaveOurChildren version of QAnon has been particularly popular among a new
coalition of anti-public-health activists who have been galvanized by the
coronavirus pandemic. As the Guardian reported in June, Facebook’s
recommendation algorithm helped facilitate cross-pollination between Facebook
groups dedicated to anti-vaccine activism, anti-coronavirus lockdowns, and
QAnon. (In Europe, it appears that a similar synergy occurred among anti-5G
activists.) Membership in QAnon Facebook groups exploded throughout the summer,
and QAnon infiltrated many online subcultures, including those formed around
evangelical Christianity, New Age spiritualism, and alternative medicine or
“wellness”.
SB145
landed like a lit rag amid all that dry social media tinder. On 31 July, the
same day LET reposted its inflammatory article, the cause was picked up by
Denise Aguilar, an anti-vaccine activist who was arrested at the California
state capitol during a protest against the coronavirus lockdown measures in
May. Aguilar misstated the facts of the bill in her Instagram post, to more
than 70,000 followers, and referred to Democrats as “DEMONcrats”. The
eight-month-old LET article quickly racked up more than 20,000 new shares,
including across Facebook groups dedicated to QAnon and #SaveOurChildren.
The
misinformation spread fast and furiously. One Facebook post that falsely declared
pedophilia to be “now LEGAL in CALIFORNIA” was viewed more than 8m times.
Rightwing news outlets jumped on the story, often using photographs of a
semi-shirtless Wiener at the Folsom Street Fair, an annual celebration of the
gay leather scene. PJ Media tried to tar the Democratic vice-presidential
nominee, Kamala Harris, by association, with a headline noting her endorsement
of the “California Lawmaker behind ‘Pro-Pedophile’ Bill SB145”.
Political
opportunists also swarmed in. Angela Stanton King, a Georgia congressional
candidate who denies supporting QAnon despite frequently sharing QAnon content
on social media, posted about the bill multiple times on Instagram. In one
post, she used the hashtag #SaveOurChildren; in a second, she reshared a post
by a popular QAnon and Pizzagate Instagram influencer. Major Williams, a Republican
planning to run for California governor in 2022, began posting aggressively
about #SaveOurChildren and SB145, racking up more than 90,000 likes on a post
that stated, falsely, that SB145 would mean that “there will be no felonies for
sex with a minor any longer in CA”. (Instagram appended a label noting that the
post contained “partly false information”.)
Even some
of Wiener’s colleagues in the state senate joined in. Melissa Melendez, a
Republican state senator from Riverside County, tweeted that SB145 “allows
adults who have ‘consensual’ sex with a 14 year old to not be charged as sex
offenders”, which is false, and called it a “disgusting bill”. When Wiener
responded with a fact check, she tweeted back: “I know exactly what the bill
does. Because read it [sic]. You’re trying to normalize sex with children. And
I’m not going to let you get away with it.” Melendez did not respond to a
request for comment from the Guardian.
Shannon
Grove, the minority leader for the state senate, also posted against SB145,
using the #SaveOurChildren hashtag on Twitter and Instagram. A spokesman for
the Senate Republican Caucus, Hector Barajas, said that Grove’s use of
#SaveOurChildren was not a reference to QAnon.
“Senator
Grove does not believe in, support, or affiliate with QAnon,” he said in a
statement. “Senator Grove believes in ‘Saving Our Children’ from human traffickers,
child predators and her use of this hashtag is not an endorsement or
affiliation with the actions of QAnon.”
‘An illness that afflicts people’s minds’
In the end,
SB145 passed both the state assembly and state senate and was signed into law
by the governor, Gavin Newsom, on the evening of 11 September.
“In 2017,
when we passed the major restructuring of the sex offender registry, something
like a third of Republican senators voted for it,” Wiener recalled. “This time
we got zero … The difference between now and 2017 is the existence of QAnon.
This sort of semi-organized structure on social media that just pumps out
massive, orchestrated misinformation. It just flies across the internet, and if
people see it on their timeline, they think it’s true.”
Wiener and
Stewart, his communications manager, said they did their best to engage with
people who were contacting him on social media, as long as their messages
didn’t include overt threats, and found that many were open to hearing the
facts. “You have a lot of people who are getting caught up in the QAnon
craziness, who are not inherently QAnon people,” Wiener said. “They see things
on their timeline and they’re convinced it’s true and they get very angry, but
they’re QAnon-adjacent.”
For those
true believers, however, Wiener sees QAnon as “an illness that afflicts
people’s minds”. “It’s one of the scariest and most bizarre things I’ve seen,”
he said.
Speaking to
the Guardian a few days before Newsom signed SB145, Wiener appeared relatively
assured that the death threats and harassment would die down eventually. “I
feel for the people who don’t have the resources and privileges that I have as
a public official,” he said. “Lives are being destroyed by QAnon and we’re not
doing enough to push back against it.”
As for the
continued dissemination of memes that attempt to portray him as a predator, he
said: “I’m not going to change a thing about who I am or what I represent. I
have thick skin.”
For the
moment, it appears that Republican party leaders who have embraced QAnon have
no intention of changing their behavior either. Throughout the day on Monday 14
September, Donald Trump Jr continued to tweet false information about the
SB145. “They’re normalizing pedophilia,” he tweeted, falsely, alongside a link
to an article about Newsom’s signing of the bill.
“It’s
insanity and we must stop it.”
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 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.
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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