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None of these things are remotely true but that doesn't mean the sizeable minority of people who believe them to be true aren't a potential danger. Noel Rooney (the Fortean Times 'Conspirasphere' writer) was at The Bell in Whitechapel as guest of the London Fortean Society to take us on a journey down a rabbit hole into the world of the bizarre viral Internet phenomenon QAnon and those that observe it, those that follow it, and those that interpret it and what that might mean for our political future.
I knew nothing of QAnon before the LFS announced the evening but some brief Wikipedia browsing had thrown up the cranky ideas outlined in my opening paragraph so I was keen to hear Noel weave it all together into some kind of narrative sense. Which he certainly did. He's a knowledgeable, confident, and almost theatrical (but not too much - thankfully) speaker who wears his wisdom lightly but is firm and determined in getting his point across.
It appeared to come from an insider in the Trump administration. Or, and this is key, it did if you wanted it to. The seemingly flimsy evidence for this was that the author of the post had used the tag 'Q'. To be accredited with Q clearance in the US government would mean one would have access to top secret information but that would not, necessarily, suggest a politician or member of the administration. A high ranking scientist would also receive Q level clearance.
Q started to post on 4chan on a much more regular basis. On average five times a day but the flow was hardly regular. Occasionally weeks would pass without a single post before, all of a sudden, he, she, or they would release an avalanche of cryptic messages to an ever expanding, ever more curious, band of followers.
When gaps in posting occurred, rumours circulated that Q had been killed by the Clintons (who we'll come back to later) and some even speculated that the QAnon phenomenon represented the end of civilisation! Phenomenon may be pushing it a bit (it's certainly less well known in the UK than it is in America) but Q's popularity spread to such a degree that merchandise appeared (t-shirts, trucker caps, and even baby grows) and it wasn't long before people started waving Q placards at Trump rallies.
Often these placards would refer to cryptic Q posts about the "coming storm", the "calm before the storm", or "where we go one, we go all" which were central to Q's mythology. A mythology which obscures a grand narrative that is never explicitly revealed but hinted at with catchphrases, shibboleths, and invitations to join the dots between the posts that soon started to be heavily populated with initials and numbers.
Things that could be interpreted in many different ways. When Hillary Clinton wasn't arrested it proved Q's predictions and inside knowledge to be demonstrably untrue. But that didn't matter. Telling the truth is not important any more (if it was Boris Johnson would be dead in a ditch today and Mark Francois would have exploded). Instead, the idea appears to be to tell so many lies, and spread so much confusion, that by the time one has been comprehensively disproved the story has long moved on.
Posts by Q (known as Q-drops) became ever more cryptic and arcane. Yet this didn't alienate people but drew them further in. They moved from 4chan to the more mainstream reddit, YouTubers started uploading videos discussing the meaning behind the Q-drops, and soon QAnon (Q is responsible for posting, QAnon seems to be the hazy collective that propagates, disseminates, and interprets Q) became "the biggest thing in the alt-right community". Even the right wing former comedian Roseanne Barr tweeted "who is Q?".
The theory that Q's followers, QAnon, began to put together was that Donald Trump, in collusion with some (but not all) of the US military, was involved in a secret war with a global deep state and they were planning to take down a paedophile, child eating, ring that had, at its very centre, Bill and Hillary Clinton. Trump may appear a bumbling and incompetent buffoon unworthy of respect but was, in fact, winning a vital war for the future of the entire planet.
Some of the far right came to believe that "reality is top secret" and the idea that we were living in the "calm before the storm" (a QAnon catchphrase) took hold. Q spread to Facebook and Twitter and Alex Jones of Infowars was an avid promoter of Q for a while. Jones, however, is so bonkers that he eventually decided that Q was shilling for a deep state to help cover up an even deeper conspiracy. It's amazing that with such a knowledge of how the world really works Jones managed to find time in his schedule to rant about chemicals in the water turning frogs gay.
While the Q-drops were being interpreted in ever more extreme ways, some turned their attention to Q's possible identity. Nobody has worked out who Q is yet but many theories have developed (as you might expect from people who devote their lives to such things). Predictably, those who've benefited from Q's 'work' have come under scrutiny as have those who have shared it, but there's also a school of thought that says that from 5th November 2018 onwards all Q-drops have come from an imposter who has hacked Q's account.
Some think Q is basic 4chan trolling (described by Noel as an alt-right take on Rickrolling) gone large, others believe an Italian group of Situationist pranksters called Wu Ming (a subset of the Luther Blissett community in Bologna) are behind it (though why a determinedly leftist group would so help the far right is hard to discern), and there's another theory that it's a live action role play (LARP) that's careered out of control!
Marginally more plausible is the belief that Dan Scavino is responsible - but on Trump's behalf. Scavino's career trajectory is of the kind that could only have been enabled under such a calamitous, and self-serving, egomaniac as Donald Trump. He rose from manager of the Trump National Golf Club Westchester to White House Director of Social Media as part of the Executive Office. One of Scavino's jobs is believed to be authoring some of Trump's tweets. It's not known if he's responsible for 'covfefe' but both Scavino and Trump (or Scavino posing as Trump) occasionally tweet "5:5", a QAnon slogan that has, of course, been given numerous interpretations but is widely held to be the QAnon community's way of saying 'loud and clear' or 'message understood'.
Many believe that Scavino is Q but there are still further theories. There's one that QAnon has been designed with the specific intention of putting pressure on the US government to stop 'harassing' Julian Assange and another proposes that the real deep state is actually running QAnon to fool people. Seemingly based on Mao's Hundred Flowers Campaign, the idea is that by getting these people to identify themselves the deep state will be able to arrest and imprison them!
The debate on the grand narrative behind the Q-drops seems less nebulous than that concerning Q's identity. The theory of Trump and assorted allies fighting a secret war against a deep state for America's future (which he is, of course, winning) only really takes traction if it has some identifiable baddies in it for him to fight against, and those identities are as obvious as the accusations about their behaviour is fantastical.
George Soros is suspected of funding revolutions worldwide in his attempt to try and destroy the white race while Hillary Clinton (brilliantly described by Noel as the 'leading coconut at the alt-right shy) is believed to be a Satanic paedophile who eats children! They believe in a sixteen year plan to destroy both the USA and Russia and even though the Q-drops never contain explicitly white supremacist content a Venn diagram where the two circles consisted of Q's followers and white supremacists would have a seriously bulging intersection.
The belief is that a civil war is coming. A war between patriots (a word whose meaning they have both hijacked and inverted) and everybody else. On 3rd August 2019, 21 year old Patrick Crusius walked into a Wal-Mart store in El Paso, Texas and shot dead twenty-two, mostly Latino, people with a semi-automatic rifle.
While Crusius did not mention QAnon (serial killers rarely leave footnotes) he did subscribe to a lot of their belief system. Like the shooter who murdered fifty-one in a Christchurch mosque, Crusius believed in The Great Replacement. An idea that there is a global plan to dilute, or even delete, the white race using mass immigration.
Dangerous conspiracy theories like these, that can and have resulted in mass murder, can often rest on the flimsiest of 'evidence'. Grass Valley Charter School in small town California was making plans to hold its annual fundraiser. Normally a very low key event of no interest to the national news or the authorities. But this time they received a series of phone calls to say that the event was under threat of a Jihadist attack.
His aesthetically displeasing tweet read:-
#FiveJobsIveHad
Grocery store clerk
2. Vocal soloist for church weddings
3. Chemist
4. Strike-replacement high school teacher
5. FBI Director, interrupted
Which seems innocent enough - and was innocent enough. Unless you're so obsessed with conspiracies that everything starts to look to you like a conspiracy. In which case you'll obviously read between the lines and see the message jihad GVCS (Grass Valley Charter School) and this will be enough to concern you about a forthcoming Islamist attack.
Eventually the police advised the school to cancel their fundraiser. Not because they were concerned about an imminent Jihadist attack, they weren't, but because they were worried that so many 'patriots' would come out to protect the school from the imagined attack that there could be violence. It's an event that has nothing to do with Q or Q-drops but has everything to do with the QAnon community that they have spawned.
If Q has disappeared, and there have been no 'drops' since August, that's no longer the important thing. The narrative is now in the hands of the Q-proofers (as they style themselves), the patrtiots, the truthers, and all the alt-right and if they're allowed to dictate the story then things will most definitely not be alright. It'll be alt-right on the night - and for many nights to come.
Part of the appeal of QAnon is that you can play it like a game (solving puzzles) but part of the danger is that its effects don't belong in the category of 'fun and games'. They can be deadly real even when a lot of the mythology that informs them is untrue or even openly fictional. The film The Matrix is taken very seriously in alt-right circles.
Almost as if it's a sacred text, as opposed to a reasonably decent and well made science fiction film. Everything about QAnon and alt-right belief is being wrapped up in a quasi-religious system of thought. To believe in white supremacy, to believe Hillary Clinton eats babies, and to believe in The Great Replacement is now an article of faith and the religion of this belief is at its crusading stage.
Normally conspiracy theorists don't like the government but with their man, Trump, in power, they're on the lookout for new enemies, new infidels to either convert or strike down. A Q t-shirt is worn in the same way as a hijab or a crucifix. A signal that you adhere to a certain belief system. It unites believers but, more dangerously, it draws a line between believers and non-believers. It others them, it dehumanises them, and that, history tells us, is just what you need for a coming war.
They believe we're in the 'calm before the storm' and the most worrying thing is that if that war doesn't come to them they're so enshrined in quasi-religious doctrine and bullshit that they'll start it themselves. Like an angry man in a pub punching somebody because of a perceived aggression on the part of the victim - but with semi-automatic rifles and the certainty of religious conviction.
In a country that's got way too many guns and way too much God already, resulting in a terrifyingly high murder rate, the idea of more of both mixed in with white supremacist conspiracy theories should be of immediate concern. QAnon's reach is not huge yet but it's growing and none of us would be best served by waiting to see what happens if and when it reaches tipping point.
Thanks, again, to the ever wonderful London Fortean Society and to Noel Rooney for a frightening but fascinating lecture. I never had time to even touch on Pizzagate, algebraic geometry, Cambridge Analytica, numerology, Kanye West, the Illuminati, the assassination of JFK, or the Qu'ran but they all cropped up in the talk too. The Q&A touched on Dick Cheney's sexual fetish having a startling similarity to the one urban myth suggests Cliff Richard has and some of the world's most famous paedophiles:- Hallowe'en birthday boy Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, and Jeffrey Epstein. That's a horrifying list of names but if people continue to believe anything that fits with their own confirmation bias it's only a matter of time before further names are added to that list of horrors. Happy Hallowe'en.
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