QAnon: The Conspiracy Craziness You’ll Be Hearing More About
By: Lisa M. Hayes – Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
At a recent Trump rally in Tampa, the mass public was exposed to a movement that’s been lurking in the darker corners of the internet quite some time. Q is a fringe movement that discusses, digests, and dissects several loosely connected and vaguely defined — and baseless — conspiracy theories and the numbers of people following Q are growing rapidly.
In one shot on Fox News of this rally, the camera angle of the president was partially blocked by a sign in the crowd reading “We Are Q.” It wasn’t the only sign supporting Q in the audience. Some attendees wore T-shirts with a blocky Q. Others held up signs with the letter. It raised some questions and some eyebrows.
They were all self-professed “followers of Q”. Q is an anonymous person or group of people who claim to be uniquely privy to highly-held government secrets. This supposedly highly classified information has been revealed on the 4chan and 8chan message boards and spread around mainstream internet platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Q has attracted quite a following — the exact number is hard to know.
Q followers are eager to consume the “breadcrumbs,” or new details in a sprawling web of conspiracy theories. Then they take the “breadcrumbs” and make “dough”. I kid you not. This is the language they use to describe the way Q lays out “information” for the masses.
If you’re wondering what’s going here on and why you should care, you’re not alone. A lot of people are trying to figure out Q, and more specifically who Q is because no one actually knows.
Cliff Notes version:
Q, also referred to as QAnon, claims to be a government insider exposing an entrenched, international bureaucracy that is secretly plotting all sorts of nefarious plots against the Trump administration and its supporters. Q uses language that implies that he or she has a military or intelligence background. It has been claimed that Q has a Q-level security clearance – so of course, it’s credible info, right?
Q spouts a string of various, but connecting, conspiracy theories that generally hold Mr. Trump as an unsung hero battling an army of anti-American saboteur elitists who have taken over government, industry, media and various other institutions of public life. QAnon appeals to far-right conspiracy theorists because most of the saboteur elitists Q targets are well-known Democrats and political liberals. Read: The Clintons – and everyone else who isn’t deeply devoted to Trump.
A little more background:
An unknown, but growing number of people are coalescing around a collection of theories they believe are a closely held secret explanation of current world events. To decode what they believe is actually happening, followers of Q sift through the president’s tweets, government datasets or news articles.
Ben Decker, a research fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, described followers of the QAnon narrative as “an interactive conspiracy community.” They feed on each other as the piece together these “crumbs” they find and quite literally treat phrases and words the president and others say as code.
Q followers spend a lot of time looking for clues that Q actually exists. A popular touchstone they use is to look for uses of the number 17 (the letter Q’s placement in the alphabet). So when Alabama’s football team presented Mr. Trump with a jersey with the number 17, it was taken as coded signaling of Q’s influence. (The team was visiting the White House as the champions of the 2017 college football season and had presented President Barack Obama with a jersey bearing the number 15 when it visited after winning a championship in 2015.)
Q’s followers firmly believe there is secret coordination and hidden motives to an endless parade of politicians, journalists, and leaders of industry and other institutions. Their theories are rarely based in any kind of reality, but that doesn’t mean they don’t believe every bit of it. As they piece together the puzzle they become more convinced of its legitimacy, sharing the information or “dough” as they go along with each other.
The community uses the language of mind-bending pop culture alternate realities like “The Matrix” or “Alice in Wonderland.” It is common to tell stories of how followers have been “red-pilled,” or have come to believe that observable reality is false and the QAnon narrative is real.
The hysterical rush to interpret clues from a “drop” of crumbs from Q resembles something close to what video gamers call an MMO, or a massive multiplayer online game.
Why should anyone care about a fringe corner of the internet?
Because QAnon is not limited to a fringe corner of the internet anymore. In addition to its front-and-center presence at Mr. Trump’s rally, Q has been promoted by celebrities including Roseanne Barr and Curt Schilling and the likes.
This hyper-paranoid worldview has bled over from the internet into the real world several times in recent months. On more than one occasion, people believed to be followers of QAnon have shown up — sometimes with weapons — in places that the character told them were somehow connected to anti-Trump conspiracies.
“The biggest danger is you are one mentally unstable person away from the next massive incident that defines whatever happens next,” Mr. Decker said. “The next Pizzagate, which for better or worse did define the political conversation for a while.”
In June, a man armed with a rifle and a handgun drove an armored vehicle to the Hoover Dam on what he said was a mission from QAnon: to demand that the government release the Justice Department’s report from its inspector general on the conduct of F.B.I. agents during the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
The report had actually been released the previous day. However, Q’s followers believed there was a secret, second report that contained far more damning information about the F.B.I. There is no indication that such a report exists. It’s really difficult to prove something doesn’t exist that doesn’t exist, especially at this level of paranoia. The man was arrested after a standoff with the police.
Most recently, a suspicious and possibly armed man showed up at the law offices of Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stephanie Clifford, the adult film performer known as Stormy Daniels, after Q posted a link to Mr. Avenatti’s website and a picture of the office building. The man did not enter the premises. However, law enforcement was called and security was obviously increased.
In an interview, Mr. Avenatti said he had received a large number of threatening emails and social media posts in recent months, “but this one we have significant reason to believe posed a significant threat.” He said local law enforcement was investigating the incident.
“I do think it is dangerous, absolutely,” Mr. Avenatti said. “And I think it is incumbent upon the president to quash this nonsense as opposed to feeding it.”
When asked about Q in a press briefing after the Tampa rally where members of the press had been harassed by Q supporters, Sarah Sanders said, “The President condemns any group that would incite violence against another individual and doesn’t support groups that would support that kind of behavior.”
However, Trump seems to pander to them publicly. He was quite visibly friendly with the Q supporters in the audience at the Tampa rally, pointing and waving at them. He also has strong private ties to some known Q supporters.
Mr. Decker said the prominence of QAnon T-shirts and signs at Mr. Trump’s televised rally in Tampa, and the elevation of that imagery via cable news coverage of the rally was troubling. “In a sense, the internet won,” he said. The problem is, the internet is not always correct or even stable.
“These are communities craving attention, they’re craving media appearances, they’re craving exposure so they can further propagate,” he said. “It is very concerning to exponentially increase the audience of this content to eight-, nine- or 10-figure populations.”
What else do we know about the size and scope of this community?
The /r/GreatAwakening subreddit board vibrantly shares memes with 49,000 followers, making it a medium-size board. There are Facebook groups, one of the most popular of which has nearly 40,000 members sharing hundreds of posts with one another a day.
Video explainers of Q followers talking through potential connected topics have racked up millions of views on YouTube, and the numbers of tweets out there are too numerous to count (and the difficulty in discerning genuine posts versus bot activity makes Twitter a poor measuring stick anyway).
But perhaps the greatest signal of the sustained, serious, and dedicated audience for this discussion can be found in the massive traffic to websites and apps set up to collect and curate preferred 4chan posts about Q.
In April 2018, an app called “QDrops” was among the 10 most downloaded paid iOS apps in the Apple Store, according to an NBC report that cited an analytics site.
The Qanon.pub site was created in March 2018 and has quickly established an audience of over seven million visits a month, according to the web analytics company SimilarWeb.
Should we be concerned?
In short, probably.
QAnon panders to a segment of the U.S. population that is already primed to believe any attempts to impeach or even narrow the power of the president is an act of war. These people are also the segment of our population most likely to be armed.
Q followers believe the Special Council’s Russia investigation is simply a front to investigate the real evil-doers in government and other areas of industry and public influence. They believe Mueller and Trump are basically teammates in secret pursuing the same agenda.
If, or more likely when that seismically insane train of thought collapses, it’s hard to know where Q followers will land or what they will do. I’m wondering what will happen if it’s revealed Q is simply the work of yet another Russian propaganda campaign. Undoubtedly to those who follow Q, it wouldn’t make any difference. What we do know is they are well connected to each other and talk openly about protecting their way of life.
Source: NYT
More by Lisa:
Lisa M. Hayes, Senior Editor of Confluence Daily.
Confluence Daily is the one place where everything comes together. The one-stop for daily news for women.
