WWG1WGA: The QAnon Phenomenon and the Dangers of Political Disinformation

In early November of 2016, users on the message board 4Chan began speculating on links between Hillary Clinton and John Podesta’s leaked emails, the Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant Comet Ping Pong, and instances of child sex trafficking. Users concluded that the basement of the restaurant was the site of a child trafficking ring, and that Clinton and Podesta were among the arbiters of the ring. The speculation culminated in an act of violence perpetrated by Edgar Madison Welch on the 4th December 2016, when he fired an assault rifle at Comet Ping Pong, entering the restaurant to search for an underground bunker supposedly containing trafficked children. Subsequently, the entire claim, dubbed ‘Pizzagate’, was debunked when it was revealed that Comet Ping Pong had no basement at all – the suspicions were entirely baseless from the start, but nevertheless these claims were proliferated into the movement we now know as QAnon. 

On the 28th October 2017 a user known as Q, or QClearancePatriot, made their first drop on 4Chan, claiming to be a high-level government analyst with classified information about a secret plot by the United States elite. Notably, the idea of Q clearance, while real, is associated with the Department of Justice, rather than the FBI or any other ‘3 letter organisation’ that followers speculated Q to be affiliated with. Additionally, Q’s identity, whether Q is a single person or some sort of entity, and the purpose behind the creation of Q, remains unknown. Essentially, Q alleged that the world is currently being controlled by a cabal of Satanic elites who run child trafficking rings and engage in paedophilia and child-eating. Q further alleged that Donald Trump, along with a group of military intelligence officials known collectively as ‘Q’, is fighting a secret war against the Cabal. This war, Q promised, would lead to ‘The Storm,’ or the release of the classified information that verifies the existence of the Cabal/Deep State, and the subsequent ‘Great Awakening,’ wherein justice would be served unto the supposed bad actors, and we would freely move into a ‘utopian’ future. 

QAnon presents a unique challenge as a source of political disinformation. The movement is, by design, resistant to its own falsifiability – as soon as something is disproven, it is canonised as deliberate misinformation which is purported to carry its own message. This line of reasoning was applied to much of what was said by Donald Trump himself. QAnon followers attributed meaning to any misspellings, misstatements, or tendency to randomly capitalise letters by Trump, inferring support and instructions for the movement. In one instance, a tweet by Trump featuring the misspelling of the word ‘consensual’ as ‘consequential’ was interpreted as an acknowledgement of the QAnon movement due to the inclusion of the letter ‘q’.  Much of what Q said has been debunked and Q’s predictions never really come true. In Q’s very first post, it was asserted that Hillary Clinton’s extradition and arrest for her involvement in child trafficking were ‘already in motion.’ Quite clearly, this never happened. QAnon followers, though, had answers – Hillary Clinton wasarrested and the Hillary we saw was but a body double; Hillary Clinton was arrested and was made to wear an ankle bracelet, that’s why she only wore pantsuits. No matter how demonstrably Q’s claims were proven false, followers shifted, constructing a new narrative that allowed for QAnon to be true. Travis Views, host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, states that QAnon followers ‘come to their conclusion first. They decide what makes them feel best and then construct conspiracy theories that help them convince themselves why that’s true.’ The malleability of Q’s claims, and its increasingly crowdsourced narrative, allows for any eventuality to be accounted for and absorbed into the new canon. If something was proven wrong, well, Q knew all along and was just waiting for everyone else to catch up. 

The danger of QAnon stems, in large part, from its centring around child trafficking. The idea that elites are trafficking children, and getting away with it, creates a moral imperative – it makes belief in QAnon seem like the right thing to doand it provides a sensible cover for any of the more radical claims or incitements of violence made by Q. The #SaveTheChildren campaign, started via QAnon, further exemplifies the danger presented by attaching something morally reprehensible to something factually untrue. This attachment allows followers of Q to assert the following: 1) trafficking of children is bad, 2) QAnon is exposing the trafficking of children, 3) it would be morally wrong not to expose trafficking of children, and 4) it would therefore be morally wrong to oppose QAnon. While this is clearly a strawman argument, its premises are fair and it becomes easy to see how potentially well intentioned individuals have fallen into QAnon because of its perpetuation. This is further problematised by Q’s inclusion of Jeffrey Epstein in the QAnon canon – another instance of attaching truth to fiction in order to make it appear credible. The #SaveTheChildren campaign began garnering support from individuals who likely would otherwise never have engaged with a fringe movement such as QAnon. This phenomenon, dubbed qAnon (lowercase q) by Joe Ondarak (a disinformation researcher at fact-checking company Logically) saw unlikely individuals such as politically uninvolved parents, New Age spirituality followers, and members of health and wellness communities joining QAnon. While a recent poll found that QAnon is unknown by 76% of Americans, with only 3% reporting that they knew ‘a lot’ about the movement, the entrance of QAnon into spaces not previously likely to be connected to fringe political movements presents a concerning trend. More unsettling is the poll conducted by NPR and Ipsos which found that 17% of adults in American believe that ‘a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media,’ illustrating the effects of disseminating disinformation in the manner that QAnon has done – while many may not know the origins, the dangerous disinformation itself is still able to reach far more people than the movement itself ever could.

Unsurprisingly, much of the lore behind QAnon can be traced back to conspiracy theories and beliefs that have existed long before Donald Trump entered the political realm. Equally unsurprising is the revelation that these ideas are inherently anti-Semitic and white supremacist. For example, the Cabal’s supposed child-eating habits are perpetrated in order to obtain ‘adrenochrome’, a supposedly miraculous life-extending drug, that can be traced to the anti-Semitic concept of blood libel. Adrenochrome, which is actually produced through the oxidisation of adrenaline, has nothing to do with the harvesting of blood from infants – the idea that it must be obtained from live subjects was co-opted from a single line in the film ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ and has since become the ubiquitous assumption among QAnon followers. While it’s clear from the outside that much of QAnon is rooted in fiction, the movement’s tacit desire to resist falsifiability means that its followers are primed to believe that any contrary assertions are deliberate red herrings designed to further the cause of the Cabal/Deep State. It’s this resistance to alternative explanations that makes QAnon so difficult to approach, or ‘prove wrong,’ even when every claim is seemingly so easily debunked by mainstream media.

It is unwise to consider those who believe in QAnon to be lost causes, unintelligent, or even inherently racist. Those who follow QAnon, in many cases, truly believe that they are doing the right thing. As Views states, ‘QAnon satisfies a need that we all have. We all need to have a feeling of significance. We all need to have a feeling of community, and we all need to have some sense of optimism for the future.’ While the conspiracy theories put forth by QAnon sound ridiculous when considered from outside of the movement, an effort must be made to understand why movements like QAnon attract such explosive support – discounting the movement on the basis of its ridiculousness only amplifies the divide between followers of such movements and the ‘rest of us,’ further disallowing the actual truth to reach these groups. This is not to say that movements such as QAnon should not be criticised – quite the opposite. But to understand the desire to join movements like QAnon is to have a chance at preventing future incidences of violence at the behest of such movements. While Q has been silent since the 2020 presidential inauguration, many QAnon followers refuse to believe that Trump has truly left office – to them, the shadow war against the Cabal continues. QAnon therefore presents a valuable source of information into the study of misinformation and the use of morality to incite violence against a supposed enemy, and it should not be discounted as a conspiracy theory that has simply run its course. 

Image courtesy of Marc Nozell via Wikimedia, ©2019, some rights reserved.