What is it that has hypnotized so many addled souls who devote themselves to decoding the Delphic clues of the QAnon conspiracy?
What they think they’re getting is “secret knowledge”, from “Q” and a bunch of other military insiders working for Donald Trump, about “the storm … a ringside seat to the final match” in a “secret war between good and evil” that will end with the slaughter of all “enemies of freedom”.
In short, an irresistible mix of “biblical retribution and participatory justice”.
The bad guys are “Democrats, Hollywood elites, business tycoons, wealthy liberals, the medical establishment, celebrities and the mass media … They’re controlled by Barack Obama” – a Muslim sleeper agent – and Hillary Clinton, “a blood-drinking ghoul who murders everyone in her way … and they’re funded by George Soros and the Rothschild banking family (no relation to the author)”.
This updated edition of Mike Rothschild’s exhaustive history of the Q movement is more important than ever. Why? Partly because of the crucial role played by so many QAnon devotees in the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 but mostly because Rothschild documents how much of this insanity has penetrated to the heart of the new Republican party, propelled by many of America’s most loathsome individuals, from Ted Cruz and Donald Trump Jr to Alex Jones, Michael Flynn and Roseanne Barr.
As Rothschild writes of Trump’s first national security adviser, “Flynn’s family even filmed themselves taking the ‘digital soldier oath’... part of what would become a total enmeshment between members of the Flynn family and QAnon.”
In the two years before the 2020 presidential election, “nearly 100 Republican candidates declared themselves to be Q Believers” while Trump “retweeted hundreds of Q followers, putting their violent fantasies and bizarre memes into tens of millions of feeds”.
Asked about a movement which has repackaged most of the oldest and harshest racist and antisemitic conspiracies for a new age, Trump gave his usual coy endorsement of the behavior of America’s most damaged internet addicts.
“I don’t know much about the movement,” he mumbled, “other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate.”
In winter 2021, as the Omicron variant sent Covid cases skyrocketing, “QAnon promoters were among the most visible anti-vaccine advocates pushing out lies and conspiracy theories” to “dissuade people from getting vaccinated”.
As with so many of QAnon adherents’ positions, the message was “both clear and completely contradicted by the available evidence: they believed the pandemic was over and any mandates related to vaccines or masks were totalitarian control mechanisms that were actually killing people”.
More than anything else, this is the latest horrific confirmation of what the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently described as “the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached”.
Like so many other ghastly conspiracies of recent decades, especially the blood libel that the Sandy Hook massacre was a staged event in which no one was actually killed, QAnon was propelled at warp speed by a combination of the incompetence and greed of all the big-tech big shots: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
Rothschild describes the usual futile internet game of Whac-A-Mole.
Reddit “abruptly banned the 70,000-member r/Great Awakening board because members had started harassing other users” and had released the personal information “of at least one person they incorrectly claimed to be a mass shooter”.
No matter: Q followers just migrated to Twitter and “closed Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members … Just in 2018, Q believers shared Q YouTube videos over 1.4m times, and drove hundreds of thousands of shares to Fox News, Breitbart and the Gateway Pundit”.
By 2019, “Trump was routinely retweeting QAnon-promoting accounts.” By the 2020 election, “Trump had retweeted hundreds … and was regularly sharing memes created by the movement”.
When Twitter and Facebook finally started “cracking down on Q iconography in the summer of 2020”, much of the movement just moved on to Instagram. Amazon and Etsy joined in the fun with books and merchandise and there were even “Q apps on the Google Play Store”.
Q’s legacy includes what now looks like the permanent deformation of the Republican party. A December 2020 poll by NPR/Ipsos found about a third of Americans believed in a shadowy “deep state” and a robust 23% of Republicans “believed in a pedophilic ring of Satan-worshiping elites”.
Rothschild ends by asking behavioral experts if there is anything the rest of us can do to help those who have gone far down this wretched rabbit hole. They say the only effective solution is a complete “unplugging” from the internet.
Every time I read another book like this one, I’m increasingly inclined to the idea that this could be the only road back to sanity for all of us.
The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything is published in paperback in the US by Melville House
