If you were an adherent, no one would be able
to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking
leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones
across the street. You could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing
cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical
church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good,
because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this
sounds crazy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators,
operating in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings. You know that they are
powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that
the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton
and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Donald Trump
stands between you and a damned and ravaged world. You see plague and
pestilence sweeping the planet, and understand that they are part of the plan.
You know that a clash between good and evil cannot be avoided, and you yearn
for the Great Awakening that is coming. And so you must be on guard at all
times. You must shield your ears from the scorn of the ignorant. You must find
those who are like you. And you must be prepared to fight.
You know all this because you believe in Q.
I.
GENESIS
The
origins of QAnon are recent, but even so, separating myth from reality can be
hard. One place to begin is with Edgar Maddison Welch, a deeply religious
father of two, who until Sunday, December 4, 2016, had lived an unremarkable
life in the small town of Salisbury, North Carolina. That morning, Welch
grabbed his cellphone, a box of shotgun shells, and three loaded guns—a 9-mm
AR-15 rifle, a six-shot .38‑caliber Colt revolver, and a
shotgun—and hopped into his Toyota Prius. He drove 360 miles to a well-to-do
neighborhood in Northwest Washington, D.C.; parked his car; put the revolver in
a holster at his hip; held the AR-15 rifle across his chest; and walked through
the front door of a pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong.
Comet
happens to be the place where, on a Sunday afternoon two years earlier, my
then-baby daughter tried her first-ever sip of water. Kids gather there with
their parents and teammates after soccer games on Saturdays, and local bands
perform on the weekends. In the back, children challenge their grandparents to
Ping-Pong matches as they wait for their pizzas to come out of the big clay
oven in the middle of the restaurant. Comet Ping Pong is a beloved spot in
Washington.
That
day, people noticed Welch right away. An AR-15 rifle makes for a conspicuous
sash in most social settings, but especially at a place like Comet. As parents,
children, and employees rushed outside, many still chewing, Welch began to move
through the restaurant, at one point attempting to use a butter knife to pry
open a locked door, before giving up and firing several rounds from his rifle
into the lock. Behind the door was a small computer-storage closet. This was
not what he was expecting.
Welch
had traveled to Washington because of a conspiracy theory known, now famously,
as Pizzagate, which claimed that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring
out of Comet Ping Pong. The idea originated in October 2016, when WikiLeaks
made public a trove of emails stolen from the account of John Podesta, a former
White House chief of staff and then the chair of Clinton’s presidential
campaign; Comet was mentioned repeatedly in exchanges Podesta had with the
restaurant’s owner, James Alefantis, and others. The emails were mainly about
fundraising events, but high-profile pro–Donald Trump figures such as Mike
Cernovich and Alex Jones began advancing the claim—which originated in trollish
corners of the internet (such as 4chan) and then spread to more accessible
precincts (Twitter, YouTube)—that the emails were proof of ritualistic child
abuse. Some conspiracy theorists asserted that it was taking place in the
basement at Comet, where there is no basement. References in the emails to “pizza”
and “pasta” were interpreted as code words for “girls” and “little boys.”
Shortly
after Trump’s election, as Pizzagate roared across the internet, Welch started
binge-watching conspiracy-theory videos on YouTube. He tried to recruit help
from at least two people to carry out a vigilante raid, texting them about his
desire to sacrifice “the lives of a few for the lives of many” and to fight “a
corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own
backyard.” When Welch finally found himself inside the restaurant and
understood that Comet Ping Pong was just a pizza shop, he set down his
firearms, walked out the door, and surrendered to police, who had by then
secured the perimeter. “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” Welch told The
New York Times after his arrest.
Welch
seems to have sincerely believed that children were being held at Comet Ping
Pong. His family and friends wrote letters to the judge on his behalf,
describing him as a dedicated father, a devout Christian, and a man who went
out of his way to care for others. Welch had trained as a volunteer
firefighter. He had gone on an earthquake-response mission to Haiti with the
local Baptist Men’s Association. A friend from his church wrote, “He exhibits
the actions of a person who strives to learn biblical truth and apply it.”
Welch himself expressed what seemed like genuine remorse, saying in a
handwritten note submitted to the judge by his lawyers: “It was never my
intention to harm or frighten innocent lives, but I realize now just how
foolish and reckless my decision was.” He was sentenced to four years in
prison.
Pizzagate
seemed to fade. Some of its most visible proponents, such as Jack Posobiec, a
conspiracy theorist who is now a correspondent for the pro-Trump cable-news
channel One America News Network, backed away. Facing the specter of legal
action by Alefantis, Alex Jones, who runs the conspiracy-theory website
Infowars and hosts an affiliated radio show, apologized for promoting
Pizzagate.
While
Welch may have expressed regret, he gave no indication that he had stopped
believing the underlying Pizzagate message: that a cabal of powerful elites was
abusing children and getting away with it. Judging from a surge of activity on
the internet, many others had found ways to move beyond the Comet Ping Pong
episode and remain focused on what they saw as the larger truth. If you paid
attention to the right voices on the right websites, you could see in real time
how the core premises of Pizzagate were being recycled, revised, and
reinterpreted. The millions of people paying attention to sites like 4chan and
Reddit could continue to learn about that secretive and untouchable cabal;
about its malign actions and intentions; about its ties to the left wing and
specifically to Democrats and especially to Clinton; about its bloodlust and
its moral degeneracy. You could also—and this would prove essential—read about
a small but swelling band of underground American patriots fighting back.
All of
this, taken together, defined a worldview that would soon have a name: QAnon,
derived from a mysterious figure, “Q,” posting anonymously on 4chan. QAnon does
not possess a physical location, but it has an infrastructure, a literature, a
growing body of adherents, and a great deal of merchandising. It also displays
other key qualities that Pizzagate lacked. In the face of inconvenient facts,
it has the ambiguity and adaptability to sustain a movement of this kind over
time. For QAnon, every contradiction can be explained away; no form of argument
can prevail against it.
Conspiracy
theories are a constant in American history, and it is tempting to dismiss them
as inconsequential. But as the 21st century has progressed, such a dismissal
has begun to require willful blindness. I was a city-hall reporter for a local
investigative-news site called Honolulu Civil Beat in 2011 when Donald Trump
was laying the groundwork for a presidential run by publicly questioning
whether Barack Obama had been born in Hawaii, as all facts and documents
showed. Trump maintained that Obama had really been born in Africa, and
therefore wasn’t a natural-born American—making him ineligible for the highest
office. I remember the debate in our Honolulu newsroom: Should we even cover
this “birther” madness? As it turned out, the allegations, based entirely on
lies, captivated enough people to give Trump a launching pad.
Nine years later, as reports of a fearsome new
virus suddenly emerged, and with Trump now president, a series of
ideas began burbling in the QAnon community: that
the coronavirus might not be real; that if it was, it had been
created by the “deep state,” the star chamber of
government officials and other elite figures who secretly run the world; that
the hysteria surrounding the pandemic was part of a plot to hurt Trump’s
reelection chances; and that media elites were cheering the death toll. Some of
these ideas would make their way onto Fox News and into the
president’s public utterances. As of late last year,
according to The New York Times, Trump had retweeted
accounts often focused on conspiracy theories, including those of QAnon, on at
least 145 occasions.
The
power of the internet was understood early on, but the full nature of that
power—its ability to shatter any semblance of shared reality, undermining civil
society and democratic governance in the process—was not. The internet also
enabled unknown individuals to reach masses of people, at a scale Marshall
McLuhan never dreamed of. The warping of shared reality leads a man with an
AR-15 rifle to invade a pizza shop. It brings online forums into being where
people colorfully imagine the assassination of a former secretary of state. It
offers the promise of a Great Awakening, in which the elites will be routed and
the truth will be revealed. It causes chat sites to come alive with commentary
speculating that the coronavirus pandemic may be the moment QAnon has been
waiting for. None of this could have been imagined as recently as the turn of
the century.
QAnon is
emblematic of modern America’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and its
enthusiasm for them. But it is also already much more than a loose collection
of conspiracy-minded chat-room inhabitants. It is a movement united in mass
rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. And we are
likely closer to the beginning of its story than the end. The group harnesses
paranoia to fervent hope and a deep sense of belonging. The way it breathes
life into an ancient preoccupation with end-times is also radically new. To
look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new
religion.
Many
people were reluctant to speak with me about QAnon as I reported this story.
The movement’s adherents have sometimes proved willing to take matters into
their own hands. Last year, the FBI classified QAnon as a domestic-terror
threat in an internal memo. The memo took note of a California man arrested in
2018 with bomb-making materials. According to the FBI, he had planned to attack
the Illinois capitol to “make Americans aware of ‘Pizzagate’ and the New World
Order (NWO) who were dismantling society.” The memo also took note of a QAnon
follower in Nevada who was arrested in 2018 after blocking traffic on the
Hoover Dam in an armored truck. The man, heavily armed, was demanding the
release of the inspector general’s report on Hillary Clinton’s emails. The FBI
memo warned that conspiracy theories stoke the threat of extremist violence,
especially when individuals “claiming to act as ‘researchers’ or
‘investigators’ single out people, businesses, or groups which they falsely
accuse of being involved in the imagined scheme.”
QAnon
adherents are feared for ferociously attacking skeptics online and for inciting
physical violence. On a now-defunct Reddit board dedicated to QAnon, commenters
took delight in describing Clinton’s potential fate. One person wrote: “I’m
surprised no one has assassinated her yet honestly.” Another: “The buzzards rip
her rotting corpse to shreds.” A third: “I want to see her blood pouring down
the gutters!”
When I
spoke with Clinton recently about QAnon, she said, “I just get under their skin
unlike anybody else … If I didn’t have Secret Service protection going through
my mail, finding weird stuff, tracking the threats against me—which are still
very high—I would be worried.” She has come to realize that the invented
reality in which conspiracy theorists place her is not some bizarre parallel
universe but actually one that shapes our own. Referring to internet trolling
operations, Clinton said, “I don’t think until relatively recently most people
understood how well organized they were, and how many different components of
their strategy they have put in place.”
II.
REVELATION
On October
28, 2017, the anonymous user now widely referred to as “Q” appeared for the
first time on 4chan, a so-called image board that is known for its grotesque
memes, sickening photographs, and brutal teardown culture. Q predicted the
imminent arrest of Hillary Clinton and a violent uprising nationwide, posting
this:
HRC
extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in
case of cross border run. Passport approved to be flagged effective 10/30 @
12:01am. Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US
to occur. US M’s will conduct the operation while NG activated. Proof check:
Locate a NG member and ask if activated for duty 10/30 across most major
cities.
And then
this:
Mockingbird
HRC detained, not arrested (yet). Where is Huma? Follow Huma. This has nothing
to do w/ Russia (yet). Why does Potus surround himself w/ generals? What is
military intelligence? Why go around the 3 letter agencies? What Supreme Court
case allows for the use of MI v Congressional assembled and approved agencies?
Who has ultimate authority over our branches of military w/o approval
conditions unless 90+ in wartime conditions? What is the military code? Where
is AW being held? Why? POTUS will not go on tv to address nation. POTUS must
isolate himself to prevent negative optics. POTUS knew removing criminal rogue
elements as a first step was essential to free and pass legislation. Who has
access to everything classified? Do you believe HRC, Soros, Obama etc have more
power than Trump? Fantasy. Whoever controls the office of the Presidency
controls this great land. They never believed for a moment they (Democrats and
Republicans) would lose control. This is not a R v D battle. Why did Soros
donate all his money recently? Why would he place all his funds in a RC?
Mockingbird 10.30.17 God bless fellow Patriots.
Clinton
was not arrested on October 30, but that didn’t deter Q, who continued posting
ominous predictions and cryptic riddles—with prompts like “Find the reflection
inside the castle”—often written in the form of tantalizing fragments and
rhetorical questions. Q made it clear that he wanted people to believe he was
an intelligence officer or military official with Q clearance, a level of
access to classified information that includes nuclear-weapons design and other
highly sensitive material. (I’m using he because many Q followers do, though Q
remains anonymous—hence “QAnon.”) Q’s tone is conspiratorial to the point of
cliché: “I’ve said too much,” and “Follow the money,” and “Some things must
remain classified to the very end.”
What
might have languished as a lonely screed on a single image board instead
incited fervor. Its profile was enhanced, according to Brandy Zadrozny and Ben
Collins of NBC News, by several conspiracy theorists whose promotion of Q in
turn helped build up their own online profiles. By now, nearly three years
since Q’s original messages appeared, there have been thousands of what his
followers call “Q drops”—messages posted to image boards by Q. He uses a
password-protected “tripcode,” a series of letters and numbers visible to other
image-board users to signal the continuity of his identity over time. (Q’s
tripcode has changed on occasion, prompting flurries of speculation.) As Q has
moved from one image board to the next—from 4chan to 8chan to 8kun, seeking a
safe harbor—QAnon adherents have only become more devoted. If the internet is
one big rabbit hole containing infinitely recursive rabbit holes, QAnon has
somehow found its way down all of them, gulping up lesser conspiracy theories
as it goes.
In its
broadest contours, the QAnon belief system looks something like this: Q is an
intelligence or military insider with proof that corrupt world leaders are
secretly torturing children all over the world; the malefactors are embedded in
the deep state; Donald Trump is working tirelessly to thwart them. (“These
people need to ALL be ELIMINATED,” Q wrote in one post.) The eventual
destruction of the global cabal is imminent, Q prophesies, but can be
accomplished only with the support of patriots who search for meaning in Q’s
clues. To believe Q requires rejecting mainstream institutions, ignoring
government officials, battling apostates, and despising the press. One of Q’s
favorite rallying cries is “You are the news now.” Another is “Enjoy the show,”
a phrase that his disciples regard as a reference to a coming apocalypse: When
the world as we know it comes to an end, everyone’s a spectator.
People
who have taken Q to heart like to say they’ve been paying attention from the
very beginning, the way someone might brag about having listened to Radiohead
before The Bends. A promise of foreknowledge is part of Q’s appeal, as is the
feeling of being part of a secret community, which is reinforced through the
use of acronyms and ritual phrases such as “Nothing can stop what is coming”
and “Trust the plan.”
One
phrase that serves as a special touchstone among QAnon adherents is “the calm
before the storm.” Q first used it a few days after his initial post, and it
arrived with a specific history. On the evening of October 5, 2017—not long
before Q first made himself known on 4chan—President Trump stood beside the
first lady in a loose semicircle with 20 or so senior military leaders and
their spouses for a photo in the State Dining Room at the White House.
Reporters had been invited to watch as Trump’s guests posed and smiled. Trump
couldn’t seem to stop talking. “You guys know what this represents?” he asked
at one point, tracing an incomplete circle in the air with his right index
finger. “Tell us, sir,” one onlooker replied. The president’s response was
self-satisfied, bordering on a drawl: “Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.”
“What’s
the storm?” one of the journalists asked.
“Could
be the calm—the calm before the storm,” Trump said again. His repetition seemed
to be for dramatic effect. The whir of camera shutters grew louder.
The
reporters became insistent: “What storm, Mr. President?”
A curt
response from Trump: “You’ll find out.”
Those 37
seconds of presidential ambiguity made headlines right away—relations with Iran
had been tense in recent days—but they would also become foundational lore for
eventual followers of Q. The president’s circular hand gesture is of particular
interest to them. You may think he was motioning to the semicircle gathered
around him, they say, but he was really drawing the letter Q in the air. Was
Trump playing the role of John the Baptist, proclaiming what was to come? Was
he himself the anointed one?
It’s
impossible to know the number of QAnon adherents with any precision, but the
ranks are growing. At least 35 current or former congressional candidates have
embraced Q, according to an online tally by the progressive nonprofit Media
Matters for America. Those candidates have either directly praised QAnon in public
or approvingly referenced QAnon slogans. (One Republican candidate for
Congress, Matthew Lusk of Florida, includes QAnon under the “issues” section of
his campaign website, posing the question: “Who is Q?”) QAnon has by now made
its way onto every major social and commercial platform and any number of
fringe sites. Tracy Diaz, a QAnon evangelist, known online by the name
TracyBeanz, has 185,000 followers on Twitter and more than 100,000 YouTube
subscribers. She helped lift QAnon from obscurity, facilitating its transition
to mainstream social media. (A publicist described Diaz as “really private” and
declined requests for an interview.) On TikTok, videos with the hashtag #QAnon
have garnered millions of views. There are too many QAnon Facebook groups, plenty
of them ghost towns, to do a proper count, but the most active ones publish
thousands of items each day. (In 2018, Reddit banned QAnon groups from its
platform for inciting violence.)
Adherents
are ever looking out for signs from on high, plumbing for portents when
guidance from Q himself is absent. The coronavirus, for instance—what does it
signify? In several of the big Facebook groups, people erupted in a frenzy of
speculation, circulating a theory that Trump’s decision to wear a yellow tie to
a White House briefing about the virus was a sign that the outbreak wasn’t
real: “He is telling us there is no virus threat because it is the exact same
color as the maritime flag that represents the vessel has no infected people on
board,” someone wrote in a post that was widely shared and remixed across
social media. Three days before the World Health Organization officially
declared the coronavirus a pandemic, Trump was retweeting a QAnon-themed meme.
“Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!” the president wrote on
March 8, sharing a Photoshopped image of himself playing a violin overlaid with
the words “Nothing can stop what is coming.”
On March
9, Q himself issued a triptych of ominous posts that seemed definitive: The
coronavirus is real, but welcome, and followers should not be afraid. The first
post shared Trump’s tweet from the night before and repeated, “Nothing Can Stop
What Is Coming.” The second said: “The Great Awakening is Worldwide.” The third
was simple: “GOD WINS.”
A month
later, on April 8, Q went on a posting spree, dropping nine posts over the span
of six hours and touching on several of his favorite topics—God, Pizzagate, and
the wickedness of the elites. “They will stop at nothing to regain power,” he
wrote in one scathing post that alleged a coordinated propaganda effort by
Democrats, Hollywood, and the media. Another accused Democrats of promoting
“mass hysteria” about the coronavirus for political gain: “What is the primary
benefit to keep public in mass-hysteria re: COVID‑19? Think
voting. Are you awake yet? Q.” And he shared
these verses from Ephesians: “Finally, be
strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Put on the full armor of
God so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil.”
Anthony
Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases, has become an object of scorn among QAnon supporters who
don’t like the bad news he delivers or the way he has contradicted Trump publicly.
In one March press conference, Trump referred to the State Department as the
“Deep State Department,” and Fauci could be seen over the president’s shoulder,
suppressing a laugh and covering his face. By then, QAnon had already declared
Fauci irredeemably compromised, because WikiLeaks had unearthed a pair of
emails he sent praising Hillary Clinton in 2012 and 2013. Sentiment about Fauci
among QAnon supporters on social-media platforms ranges from “Fauci is a Deep
State puppet” to “FAUCI is a BLACKHAT!!!”—the term QAnon uses for people who
support the evil cabal that Q warns about. One person, using the hashtags
#DeepStateCabal and #Qanon, tweeted this: “Watch Fauci’s hand signals and body
language at the press conferences. What is he communicating?” Another shared an
image of Fauci standing in a lab with Barack Obama, with the caption “Obama and
‘Dr.’ Fauci in the lab creating coronovirus [sic]. #DeepstateDoctor.” The
Justice Department recently approved heightened security measures for Fauci
because of the mounting volume of threats against him.
In the
final days before Congress passed a $2 trillion economic-relief package in late
March, Democrats insisted on provisions that would make it easier for people to
vote by mail, prompting Q himself to weigh in with dismay: “These people are
sick! Nothing can stop what is coming. Nothing.”
III. BELIEVERS
On a
bone-cold thursday in early January, a crowd was swelling in downtown Toledo,
Ohio. By lunchtime, seven hours before the start of Trump’s first campaign
rally of the new year, the line to get into the Huntington Center had already
snaked around two city blocks. The air was electric with possibility, and the
whole scene possessed a Jimmy Buffett–meets–Michigan Militia atmosphere: lots
of white people, a good deal of vaping, red-white-and-blue everything. Down the
street, someone had affixed a two-story banner across the top of a burned-out
brick building. It read: president trump, welcome to toledo, ohio: who is q …
military intelligence? q+? (“Q+” is QAnon shorthand for Trump himself.) Vendors
at the event were selling Q buttons and T-shirts. QAnon merchandise comes in a
great variety; online, you can buy Great Awakening coffee ($14.99) and QAnon
bracelets with tiny silver pizza charms ($20.17).
I worked
my way toward the back of the line, making small talk and asking who, if
anyone, knew anything about QAnon. One woman’s eyes lit up, and in a single
fluid motion she unzipped and removed her jacket, then did a little jump so
that her back was to me. I could see a Q made out of duct tape, which she’d
pressed onto her red T-shirt. Her name was Lorrie Shock, and the first thing
she wanted me to know was this: “We’re not a domestic-terror group.”
Shock
was born in Ohio and never left, “a lifer,” as she put it. She had worked at a
Bridgestone factory, making car parts, for most of her adult life. “Real hot
and dirty work, but good money,” she told me. “I got three kids through
school.” Today, in what she calls her preretirement job, she cares for adults
with special needs, spending her days in a tender routine of playing games with
them and helping them in and out of a swimming pool. Shock came to the Trump
rally with her friend Pat Harger, who had retired after 32 years at Whirlpool.
Harger’s wife runs a catering business, which is what had kept her from
attending the rally that day. Harger and Shock are old friends. “Since the
fourth grade,” Harger told me, “and we’re 57 years old.”
Now that
Shock’s girls are grown and she’s not working a factory job, she has more time
for herself. That used to mean reading novels in the evening—she doesn’t own a
television—but now it means researching Q, who first came to her notice when
someone she knew mentioned him on Facebook in 2017: “What caught my attention
was ‘research.’ Do your own research. Don’t take anything for granted. I don’t
care who says it, even President Trump. Do your own research, make up your own
mind.”
The
QAnon universe is sprawling and deep, with layer upon layer of context,
acronyms, characters, and shorthand to learn. The “castle” is the White House.
“Crumbs” are clues. CBTS stands for “calm before the storm,” and WWG1WGA stands
for “Where we go one, we go all,” which has become an expression of solidarity
among Q followers. (Both of these phrases, oddly, are used in the trailer for
the 1996 Ridley Scott film White Squall—watch it on YouTube, and you’ll see
that the comments section is flooded with pro-Q sentiment.) There is also a “Q
clock,” which refers to a calendar some factions of Q supporters use to try to
decode supposed clues based on time stamps of Q drops and Trump tweets.
At the
height of her devotion, Shock was spending four to six hours a day reading and
rereading Q drops, scouring documents online, taking notes. Now, she says, she
spends closer to an hour or two a day. “When I first started, everybody thought
I was crazy,” Shock said. That included her daughters, who are “very liberal
Hillary and Bernie supporters,” Shock said. “I still love them. They think I’m
crazy, but that’s all right.”
Harger,
too, once thought Shock had lost it. “I was doubting her,” he told me. “I would
send her texts saying, Lorrie.”
“He was
like, ‘What the hell?’ ” Shock said, laughing. “So my comment to him would be
‘Do your own research.’ ”
“And I
did,” Harger said. “And it’s like, Wow.”
Taking a
page from Trump’s playbook, Q frequently rails against legitimate sources of
information as fake. Shock and Harger rely on information they encounter on
Facebook rather than news outlets run by journalists. They don’t read the local
paper or watch any of the major television networks. “You can’t watch the
news,” Shock said. “Your news channel ain’t gonna tell us shit.” Harger says he
likes One America News Network. Not so long ago, he used to watch CNN, and
couldn’t get enough of Wolf Blitzer. “We were glued to that; we always have
been,” he said. “Until this man, Trump, really opened our eyes to what’s
happening. And Q. Q is telling us beforehand the stuff that’s going to happen.”
I asked Harger and Shock for examples of predictions that had come true. They
could not provide specifics and instead encouraged me to do the research
myself. When I asked them how they explained the events Q had predicted that
never happened, such as Clinton’s arrest, they said that deception is part of
Q’s plan. Shock added, “I think there were more things that were predicted that
did happen.” Her tone was gentle rather than indignant.
Harger
wanted me to know that he’d voted for Obama the first time around. He grew up
in a family of Democrats. His dad was a union guy. But that was before Trump
appeared and convinced Harger that he shouldn’t trust the institutions he
always thought he could. Shock nodded alongside him. “The reason I feel like I
can trust Trump more is, he’s not part of the establishment,” she said. At one
point, Harger told me I should look into what happened to John F. Kennedy
Jr.—who died in 1999, when his airplane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off
Martha’s Vineyard—suggesting that Hillary Clinton had had him assassinated.
(Alternatively, a contingent of QAnon believers say that JFK Jr. faked his
death and that he’s a behind-the-scenes Trump supporter, and possibly even Q
himself. Some anticipate his dramatic public return so that he can serve as
Trump’s running mate in 2020.) When I asked Harger whether there’s any evidence
to support the assassination claim, he flipped my question around: “Is there
any evidence not to?”
Reading
Shock’s Facebook page is an exercise in contradictions, a toggling between
banality and hostility. There she is in a yellow kayak in her profile photo,
bright-red hair spilling out of a ski hat, a giant smile on her face. There are
the photos of her daughters, and of a granddaughter with Shirley Temple curls.
Yet Q is never far away. On Christmas Eve, Shock shared one post that seemed to
come straight out of the QAnon universe but also pulled in an older, classic
conspiracy: “X marks the spot over Roswell NM. X17 Fifth Force Particle. X + Q
Coincidence?” That same day, she shared a separate post suggesting that
Michelle Obama is secretly a man. Someone responded with skepticism: “I am still
not convinced. She shows and acts evil, but a man?” Shock’s reply: “Research
it.” There was a post claiming that Representative Adam Schiff had raped the
body of a dead boy at the Chateau Marmont, in Los Angeles—Harger shows up here,
with a “huh??” in the comments—and a warning that George Soros was going after
Christian evangelicals. In other posts, Shock playfully taunted “libs” and her
“Trump-hating friends,” and also shared a video of her daughter singing
Christmas carols.
In
Toledo, I asked Shock if she had any theories about Q’s identity. She answered
immediately: “I think it’s Trump.” I asked if she thinks Trump even knows how
to use 4chan. The message board is notoriously confusing for the uninitiated,
nothing like Facebook and other social platforms designed to make it easy to
publish quickly and often. “I think he knows way more than what we think,” she
said. But she also wanted me to know that her obsession with Q wasn’t about
Trump. This had been something she was reluctant to speak about at first. Now,
she said, “I feel God led me to Q. I really feel like God pushed me in this
direction. I feel like if it was deceitful, in my spirit, God would be telling
me, ‘Enough’s enough.’ But I don’t feel that. I pray about it. I’ve said,
‘Father, should I be wasting my time on this?’ … And I don’t feel that feeling
of I should stop.”
Arthur
Jones, the director of the documentary film Feels Good Man, which tells the
story of how internet memes infiltrated politics in the 2016 presidential
election, told me that QAnon reminds him of his childhood growing up in an
evangelical-Christian family in the Ozarks. He said that many people he knew
then, and many people he meets now in the most devout parts of the country, are
deeply interested in the Book of Revelation, and in trying to unpack “all of
its pretty-hard-to-decipher prophecies.” Jones went on: “I think the same kind
of person would all of a sudden start pulling at the threads of Q and start
feeling like everything is starting to fall into place and make sense. If you
are an evangelical and you look at Donald Trump on face value, he lies, he
steals, he cheats, he’s been married multiple times, he’s clearly a sinner. But
you are trying to find a way that he is somehow part of God’s plan.”
You
can’t always tell what kind of Q follower you’re encountering. Anyone using a Q
hashtag could be a true believer, like Shock, or simply someone cruising a site
and playing along for a vicarious thrill. Surely there are people who know that
Q is a fantasy but participate because there’s an element of QAnon that
converges with a live-action role-playing game. In the sprawling constellation
of Q supporters, Shock and Harger seem prototypical. They happened upon Q and
something clicked. The fable plugged neatly into their existing worldview.
IV. PROFESSIONALS
Q may be
anonymous, but leaders of the QAnon movement have emerged in public and built
their own large audiences. David Hayes is better known by his online handle:
PrayingMedic. In his YouTube videos, he exudes the even-keeled authoritarian
energy of a middle-school principal. PrayingMedic is one of the best-known
QAnon evangelists on the planet. He has more than 300,000 Twitter followers and
a similar number of YouTube subscribers. Hayes, a former paramedic, lives in a
terra-cotta-roofed subdivision in Gilbert, Arizona, with his wife, Denise, an
artist whom he met on the dating site Christian Mingle in 2007. Both describe
themselves as former atheists who came to their faith in God, and to each
other, late in life, after previous marriages. Hayes has been following Q since
the beginning, or close to it. “Q Anon is pretty darn interesting,” he wrote on
his Facebook page on December 12, 2017, six weeks after Q’s first post on
4chan. That same day, he wrote about a sudden calling he felt:
My
dreams have suggested that God wants me to keep my attention focused on
politics and current events. After some prayer, I’ve decided to do a regular
news and current events show on Periscope. I’m trying to do one broadcast a
day. (The videos are also being posted to my Youtube channel.) That is all.
Hayes
has developed a following in part because of his sheer ubiquity but also
because he skillfully wears the mantle of a skeptic—I’m not one of those
crazies. Hayes is not a QAnon hobbyist, though. He’s a professional. There are
income streams to be tapped, modest but expanding. On Amazon, Hayes’s book Calm
Before the Storm, the first in what he says could easily be a 10-book series of
“Q Chronicles,” sells for $15.29. Hayes writes in the introduction that he and
Denise have devoted their attention full-time to QAnon since 2017. “Denise and
I have been blessed by those who have helped support us while we set aside our
usual work to research Q’s messages,” he wrote. He has published several other
books, which offer a glimpse into an earlier life. The titles include Hearing
God’s Voice Made Simple, Defeating Your Adversary in the Court of Heaven, and
American Sniper: Lessons in Spiritual Warfare. Hayes registered Praying Medic
as a religious nonprofit in Washington State in 2018.
Hayes
tells his followers that he thinks Q is an open-source intelligence operation,
made possible by the internet and designed by patriots fighting corruption
inside the intelligence community. His interpretation of Q is ultimately
religious in nature, and centers on the idea of a Great Awakening. “I believe
The Great Awakening has a double application,” Hayes wrote in a blog post in
November 2019.
It
speaks of an intellectual awakening—the awareness by the public to the truth
that we’ve been enslaved in a corrupt political system. But the exposure of the
unimaginable depravity of the elites will lead to an increased awareness of our
own depravity. Self-awareness of sin is fertile ground for spiritual revival. I
believe the long-prophesied spiritual awakening lies on the other side of the
storm.
Q
followers agree that a Great Awakening lies ahead, and will bring salvation.
They differ in their personal preoccupations with respect to the here and now.
Some in the QAnon world are highly focused on what they perceive as degeneracy
in the mainstream media, a perception fueled in equal measure by Q and by
Trump. Others obsess over the intelligence community and the notion of a deep
state. An active subsection of Q followers probes the Jeffrey Epstein case.
There are those who claim knowledge of a 16-year plan by Hillary Clinton and
Barack Obama to destroy the United States by means of mass drought, weaponized
disease, food shortages, and nuclear war. During the investigation into Russian
interference in the 2016 presidential election, some Q followers promoted the idea
that Trump was secretly working with Robert Mueller, and that the special
counsel’s report would both exonerate Trump and lead to mass arrests of members
of the corrupt cabal. (The eventual Mueller report, released in April 2019,
neither exonerated Trump nor led to mass arrests.)
These
divergent byways are elemental to QAnon’s staying power—this is a very
welcoming belief system, warm in its tolerance for contradiction—and are also
what makes it possible for a practical man like Hayes to play the role that he
does. QAnon is complex and confusing. People from all over the internet seek
guidance from someone who seems levelheaded. (Hayes was quick to respond to my
emails but declined requests for an interview. He complained to me that
journalists refuse to see QAnon for what it really is, and therefore cannot be
trusted.)
The most
prominent QAnon figures have a presence beyond the biggest social-media
platforms and image boards. The Q universe encompasses numerous blogs,
proprietary websites, and types of chat software, as well as alternative
social-media platforms such as Gab, the site known for anti-Semitism and white
nationalism, where many people banned from Twitter have congregated. Vloggers
and bloggers promote their Patreon accounts, where people can pay them in
monthly sums. There’s also money to be made from ads on YouTube. That seems to
be the primary focus for Hayes, whose videos have been viewed more than 33
million times altogether. His “Q for Beginners” video includes ads from
companies such as the vacation-rental site Vrbo and from The Epoch Times, an
international pro-Trump newspaper. Q evangelists have taken a “publish everywhere”
approach that is half outreach, half redundancy. If one platform cracks down on
QAnon, as Reddit did, they won’t have to start from scratch somewhere else.
Already embroiled in the battle between good and evil, QAnon has involved
itself in another battle—between the notion of an open web for the people and a
gated internet controlled by a powerful few.
V.
WHO
IS Q?
Any new
belief system runs into opposition. In December 2018, Matt Patten, a veteran
SWAT-team sergeant in the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, in Florida, was
photographed with Vice President Mike Pence on an airport tarmac. Patten wore a
patch on his tactical vest that bore the letter Q. The photograph was tweeted
by the vice president’s office and then went viral in the QAnon community. The
tweet was quickly taken down. Patten was demoted. When I knocked on his door on
a gloomy day in August, no one answered. But as I turned to leave, I noticed
two large bumper stickers on the white mailbox out front. One said trump, and
the other said #qanon: patriots fight.
Late
last summer, Q himself lost his platform. He had migrated from 4chan (fearing
that the site had been “infiltrated”) to the image board 8chan, and then 8chan
went dark. Three days before I stood on Patten’s doorstep, 22 people had been
killed in a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and police revealed
that the alleged killer had posted a manifesto on 8chan just before carrying
out the attack. The episode had eerie similarities to two other shootings. Four
months earlier, in April 2019, the suspected shooter in a murderous rampage at
a synagogue in Poway, California, had posted an anti-Semitic letter on 8chan.
Weeks before that, the man who killed 51 worshippers at two New Zealand mosques
had posted a white-supremacist manifesto on 8chan.
After El
Paso, 8chan’s owner, Jim Watkins, was ordered to testify before the House
Committee on Homeland Security. Watkins had bought the site four years earlier
from its founder, Fredrick Brennan, now 26, who eventually cut all ties to
8chan. “Regrettably, this is at least the third act of white supremacist
extremist violence linked to your website this year,” wrote Representatives
Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, and Mike Rogers, a Republican
from Alabama, when they summoned Watkins to Capitol Hill. “Americans deserve to
know what, if anything, you, as the owner and operator, are doing to address
the proliferation of extremist content on 8chan.”
8chan
had already lost crucial services, which had forced it to shut down. The CEO of
Cloudflare, which had helped protect the site from cyberattacks, explained his
decision to drop 8chan in an open letter after the El Paso shooting: “The
rationale is simple: They have proven themselves to be lawless and that
lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths.” Watkins promised to keep the
site off the internet until after his congressional appearance. He is a former
U.S. Army helicopter repairman who got into the business of websites while he
was still in the military. Among other things, in 1997, he launched a
successful porn site called Asian Bikini Bar. On his YouTube channel, where he
posts under the username Watkins Xerxes, he frequently sings hymns, reads
verses from the Bible, praises Trump, and touches on themes underlying
QAnon—warning against the deep state and reminding his audience members that
they are now “the actual reporting mechanism of the news.” He also shows off
his fountain-pen collection and practices yoga. When he arrived on Capitol
Hill, in September 2019, Watkins wore a bulbous silver Q pinned to his collar.
His testimony was behind closed doors. In November, 8chan flickered back to
life as 8kun. It was sporadically accessible, limping along through a series of
cyberattacks. It received assistance from a Russian hosting service that is
typically associated with spreading malware. When Q reappeared on 8kun, he used
the same tripcode that he had used on 8chan. He posted other hints meant to
verify the continuity of his identity, including an image of a notebook and a
pen that had appeared in earlier posts.
Fredrick
Brennan’s theory is that Jim and his son Ron, who is the site’s administrator,
knew 8kun needed Q to attract users. “I definitely, definitely, 100 percent
believe that Q either knows Jim or Ron Watkins, or was hired by Jim or Ron
Watkins,” Brennan told me. Jim and Ron have both denied knowing Q’s identity.
“I don’t know who Q is,” Ron told me in a direct message on Twitter. Jim told
an interviewer on One America News Network in September 2019: “I don’t know who
QAnon is. Really, we run an anonymous website.” Both insist that they care
about maintaining 8kun only because it is a platform for unfettered free
speech. “8kun is like a piece of paper, and the users decide what is written on
it,” Ron told me. “There are many different topics and users from many
different backgrounds.” But their interest in Q is well documented. In
February, Jim started a super PAC called Disarm the Deep State, which echoes
Q’s messages and which is running paid ads on 8kun.
Brennan
has long been feuding with the Watkinses. Jim is suing Brennan for libel in the
Philippines, where they both lived until recently, and Brennan is actively
fighting Jim’s attempts to become a naturalized citizen there. “They kept Q
alive,” Brennan told me. “We wouldn’t be talking about this right now if Q
didn’t go on the new 8kun. The entire reason we’re talking about this is
they’re directly related to Q. And, you know, I worry constantly that there is
going to be, as early as November 2020, some kind of shooting or something
related to Q if Trump loses. Or parents killing their children to save them
from the hell-world that is to come because the deep state has won. These are
real possibilities. I just feel like what they have done is totally
irresponsible to keep Q going.”
The
story of Q is premised on the need for Q to remain anonymous. It’s why Q
originally picked 4chan, one of the last places built for anonymity on the
social web. “I’ve often related Q to previous figures like John Titor or
Satoshi Nakamoto,” Brennan told me, referring to two legends of internet
anonymity. Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the unknown creator of bitcoin.
John Titor is the name used on several message boards in 2000 and 2001 by
someone claiming to be a military time traveler from the year 2036.
QAnon
adherents see Q’s anonymity as proof of Q’s credibility—despite their deep
mistrust of unnamed sources in the media. Every faction of QAnon has its own
hunches, alliances, and interpersonal dramas related to the question of Q’s
identity. The theories fit into three broad groups. In the first group are
theories that assume Q is a single individual who has been posting all alone
this entire time. This is where you’ll find the people who say that Trump
himself is Q, or even that PrayingMedic is Q. (This category also includes the
possibility, raised by people outside of QAnon, that Q is a lone Trump
supporter who started posting as a form of fan fiction, not realizing it would
take off; and the idea that Q began posting in order to parody Trump and his
supporters, not anticipating that people would take him seriously.) The second
group of theories holds that the original Q posted continuously for a while,
but then something changed. This second category includes Brennan’s idea that
the Watkinses are now paying Q, or are paying someone to carry on as Q, or are
even acting as Q themselves. The third group of theories holds that Q is a
collective, with a small number of people sharing access to the account. This
third category includes the notion that Q is a new kind of open-source
military-intelligence agency.
Many QAnon adherents see significance in Trump
tweets containing words that begin with the letter Q. Recent world events have
rewarded them amply. “I am a great friend and admirer of the Queen & the
United Kingdom,” Trump began one tweet on March 29. The day before, he had
tweeted this: “I am giving consideration to a QUARANTINE.” The Q crowd seized
on both tweets, arguing that if you ignore most of the letters in the messages,
you’ll find confession
from Trump: “I am … Q.”.
VI. REASON
VERSUS FAITH
in a
miami coffee shop last year, I met with a man who has gotten a flurry of
attention in recent years for his research on conspiracy theories—a
political-science professor at the University of Miami named Joseph Uscinski. I
have known Uscinski for years, and his views are nuanced, deeply informed, and
far from anything you would consider knee-jerk partisanship. Many people
assume, he told me, that a propensity for conspiracy thinking is predictable
along ideological lines. That’s wrong, he explained. It’s better to think of
conspiracy thinking as independent of party politics. It’s a particular form of
mind-wiring. And it’s generally characterized by acceptance of the following
propositions: Our lives are controlled by plots hatched in secret places.
Although we ostensibly live in a democracy, a small group of people run everything,
but we don’t know who they are. When big events occur—pandemics, recessions,
wars, terrorist attacks—it is because that secretive group is working against
the rest of us.
QAnon
isn’t a far-right conspiracy, the way it’s often described, Uscinski went on,
despite its obviously pro-Trump narrative. And that’s because Trump isn’t a
typical far-right politician. Q appeals to people with the greatest attraction
to conspiracy thinking of any kind, and that appeal crosses ideological lines.
Many of
the people most prone to believing conspiracy theories see themselves as
victim-warriors fighting against corrupt and powerful forces. They share a
hatred of mainstream elites. That helps explain why cycles of populism and
conspiracy thinking seem to rise and fall together. Conspiracy thinking is at
once a cause and a consequence of what Richard Hofstadter in 1964 famously
described as “the paranoid style” in American politics. But do not make the
mistake of thinking that conspiracy theories are scribbled only in the
marginalia of American history. They color every major news event: the
assassination of John F. Kennedy, the moon landing, 9/11. They have helped
sustain consequential eruptions, such as McCarthyism in the 1950s and
anti-Semitism at any moment you choose. But QAnon is different. It may be
propelled by paranoia and populism, but it is also propelled by religious
faith. The language of evangelical Christianity has come to define the Q
movement. QAnon marries an appetite for the conspiratorial with positive
beliefs about a radically different and better future, one that is preordained.
That was
part of the reason Uscinski’s mother, Shelly, 62, was attracted to QAnon.
Shelly, who lives in New Hampshire, was tooling around on YouTube a couple of
years ago, looking for how-to videos—she can’t remember for what, exactly,
maybe a tutorial on how to get her car windows sparkling-clean—and the
algorithm served up QAnon. She remembers a feeling of magnetic attraction.
“Like, Wow, what is this? ” she recalled when I spoke with her by phone. “For
me, it was revealing some things that maybe I was hoping would come to pass.”
She sensed that Q knew her anxieties—as if someone was taking her train of
thought and “actually verbalizing it.” Shelly’s frustrations are broad, and
directed primarily at the institutions she sees as broken. She’s fed up with
the education system, the financial system, the media. “Even our churches are
out of whack,” she said. One of the things that resonated most with her about Q
was his disgust with “the fake news.” She gets her information mostly from Fox
News, Twitter, and the New Hampshire Union Leader. “In my lifetime, I guess,
things have gotten progressively worse,” Shelly said. She added a little later:
“Q gives us hope. And it’s a good thing, to be hopeful.”
Shelly likes
that Q occasionally quotes from scripture, and she likes that he encourages
people to pray. In the end, she said, QAnon is about something so much bigger
than Trump or anyone else. “There are QAnon followers out there,” Shelly said,
“who suggest that what we’re going through now, in this crazy political realm
we’re in now, with all of the things that are happening worldwide, is very
biblical, and that this is Armageddon.”
I asked
her if she thinks the end of the world is upon us. “It wouldn’t surprise me,”
she said.
Joseph
Uscinski is disturbed by his mother’s belief in QAnon. He’s not comfortable
talking about it. And Shelly doesn’t quite appreciate the irony of the family’s
situation, because she doesn’t believe QAnon is a form of conspiracy thinking
in the first place. At one point in our conversation, when I referred to QAnon
as a conspiracy theory, she quickly interrupted: “It’s not a theory. It’s the
foretelling of things to come.” She laughed hard when I asked if she had ever
tried to get Joseph to believe in QAnon. The answer was an unequivocal no: “I’m
his mom, so I love him.”
VII.
APOCALYPSE
Watchkeepers
for the End of Days can easily find signs of impending doom—in comets and
earthquakes, in wars and pandemics. It has always been this way. In 1831, a
Baptist preacher in rural New York named William Miller began to publicly share
his prediction that the Second Coming of Jesus was imminent. Eventually he settled
on a date: October 22, 1844. When the sun came up on October 23, his followers,
known as the Millerites, were crushed. The episode would come to be known as
the Great Disappointment. But they did not give up. The Millerites became the
Adventists, who in turn became the Seventh-day Adventists, who now have a
worldwide membership of more than 20 million. “These people in the QAnon
community—I feel like they are as deeply delusional, as deeply invested in
their beliefs, as the Millerites were,” Travis View, one of the hosts of a
podcast called QAnon Anonymous, which subjects QAnon to acerbic analysis, told
me. “That makes me pretty confident that this is not something that is going to
go away with the end of the Trump presidency.”
QAnon
carries on a tradition of apocalyptic thinking that has spanned thousands of
years. It offers a polemic to empower those who feel adrift. In his classic
1957 book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, the historian Norman Cohn examined
the emergence of apocalyptic thinking over many centuries. He found one common
condition: This way of thinking consistently emerged in regions where rapid
social and economic change was taking place—and at periods of time when
displays of spectacular wealth were highly visible but unavailable to most
people. This was true in Europe during the Crusades in the 11th century, and
during the Black Death in the 14th century, and in the Rhine Valley in the 16th
century, and in William Miller’s New York in the 19th century. It is true in
America in the 21st century.
The
Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are
thriving religious movements indigenous to America. Do not be surprised if
QAnon becomes another. It already has more adherents by far than either of
those two denominations had in the first decades of their existence. People are
expressing their faith through devoted study of Q drops as installments of a
foundational text, through the development of Q-worshipping groups, and through
sweeping expressions of gratitude for what Q has brought to their lives. Does
it matter that we do not know who Q is? The divine is always a mystery. Does it
matter that basic aspects of Q’s teachings cannot be confirmed? The basic
tenets of Christianity cannot be confirmed. Among the people of QAnon, faith
remains absolute. True believers describe a feeling of rebirth, an irreversible
arousal to existential knowledge. They are certain that a Great Awakening is
coming. They’ll wait as long as they must for deliverance.
Trust
the plan. Enjoy the show. Nothing can stop what is coming.
The
Prophecies of Q : American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new
phase. By Adrienne LaFrance. The Atlantic , June 2020.
Followers
of the QAnon movement believe in wild and dangerous conspiracy theories about
U.S. President Donald Trump. Now a faction within the movement has been
interpreting the Bible through QAnon conspiracies.
I have
been studying the growth of the QAnon movement as part of my research into how
extremist religious and political organizations create propaganda and recruit
new members to ideological causes.
On Feb.
23, I logged onto Zoom to observe the first public service of what is
essentially a QAnon church operating out of the Omega Kingdom Ministry (OKM).
I’ve spent 12 weeks attending this two-hour Sunday morning service.
What
I’ve witnessed is an existing model of neo-charismatic home churches — the
neo-charismatic movement is an offshoot of evangelical Protestant Christianity
and is made up of thousands of independent organizations — where QAnon
conspiracy theories are reinterpreted through the Bible. In turn, QAnon
conspiracy theories serve as a lens to interpret the Bible itself.
The
QAnon movement began in 2017 after someone known only as Q posted a series of
conspiracy theories about Trump on the internet forum 4chan. QAnon followers
believe global elites are seeking to bring down Trump, whom they see as the
world’s only hope to defeat the “deep state.”
OKM is
part of a network of independent congregations (or ekklesia) called Home
Congregations Worldwide (HCW). The organization’s spiritual adviser is Mark
Taylor, a self-proclaimed “Trump Prophet” and QAnon influencer with a large
social media following on Twitter and YouTube.
The
resource page of the HCW website only links to QAnon propaganda — including the
documentary Fall Cabal by Dutch conspiracy theorist Janet Ossebaard, which is
used to formally indoctrinate e-congregants into QAnon. This 10-part YouTube
series was the core material for the weekly Bible study during QAnon church
sessions I observed.
The
Sunday service is led by Russ Wagner, leader of the Indiana-based OKM, and
Kevin Bushey, a retired colonel running for election to the Maine House of
Representatives.
The
service begins with an opening prayer from Wagner that he says will protect the
Zoom room from Satan. This is followed by an hour-long Bible study where Wagner
might explain the Fall Cabal video that attendees had just watched or offer his
observations on socio-political events from the previous week.
Everything
is explained though the lens of the Bible and QAnon narratives. Bushey then
does 45 minutes of decoding items that have appeared recently on the app called
QMap that is used to share conspiracy theories. The last 15 minutes are
dedicated to communion and prayer.
At a
service held on April 26, Wagner and Bushey spoke about a QAnon theory, called
Project Looking Glass, that the U.S. military has secretly developed a form of
time-travel technology. Wagner suggested to e-congregants that time travel can
be explained by certain passages in the Bible.
On May
3, the theme of the QAnon portion of the service was about COVID-19. Bushey
spoke about a popular QAnon theory that the pandemic was planned. (There is no
evidence of this.) And when an anti-vax conspiracy theory documentary called
“Plandemic” went viral , the video was shared on the HCW websites as a way for
e-congregants to consume the latest in a series of false theories about the
coronavirus.
What is
clear is that Wagner and Bushey are leveraging religious beliefs and their
“authority” as a pastor and ex-military officer to indoctrinate attendees into
the QAnon church. Their objective is to train congregants to form their own
home congregations in the future and grow the movement.
OKM’s
ministry is rooted in Taylor’s prophecies. Wagner regularly mentions that if it
wasn’t for Taylor, he would have never started this ministry.
On its
website, OKM references the Seven Mountains of Societal Influence. Seven
Mountains utilizes the language of Dominionism — a theology that believes
countries, including the United States, should be governed by Christian
biblical law. Its goal is to attain sociopolitical and economic transformation
through the gospel of Jesus in what it calls the seven mountains or spheres of
society: religion, family, education, government, media, entertainment and
business. This blends QAnon’s apocalyptic desire to destroy society
“controlled” by the deep state with the need for the Kingdom of God on Earth.
Wagner
and Bushey have taught their congregation to stop listening to any media —even
Fox News — because they’re are all “Luciferian.” What they provide instead is a
road map to QAnon radicalization comprised of QAnon YouTube channels for the
congregation’s daily media diet, the Qmap website that lists new QAnon
conspiracy theories and Twitter influencers.
They
further insist that as Trump continues to “drain the swamp” in Washington, it’s
“our” responsibility to drain the deep state church swamp. They believe the
same deep state that controls the world has also infiltrated traditional
churches. As Wagner stated in his April 12 service: “I am here to focus on the
deep state church. This goes beyond our church and involves our culture and our
politics. Kevin is here to talk about QAnon and the military operation to save
the world.”
Like any
church, they also run outreach ministries. OKM is currently raising funds for
something called Reclamation Ranch, which Wagner describes as a safe place for
children rescued after being held underground by the deep state. Children at
risk is an ongoing theme in many QAnon conspiracy theories, including the
famous fake “Pizzagate” theory.
As of
May, OKM moved from Zoom to YouTube to accommodate the growth in attendees. At
last count, approximately 300 accounts participated in the recent services.
While
that’s not a lot of followers, we should be concerned about these latest
developments. OKM provides formalized religious indoctrination into QAnon, a
conspiracy movement that is both a public health threat by spreading false
information about the coronavirus pandemic and a national security concern.
The
Church of QAnon: Will conspiracy theories form the basis of a new religious
movement? By Marc-André Argentino. The Conversation , May 18, 2020.
First
there was the pandemic, then came the “infodemic” — a term the head of the
World Health Organization defines as the spread of false information about
COVID-19.
The most
dangerous conspiracy theories about the coronavirus are now part of the QAnon
phenomenon. For months now, actors in QAnon have downplayed the severity of the
crisis, amplified medical disinformation and have been originators of hoaxes.
The
QAnon movement started in 2017 after someone using an anonymous account known
only as Q posted wild conspiracy theories about U.S. President Donald Trump on
the internet forum 4chan.
QAnon
conspiracy theorists believe a deep state cabal of global elites is responsible
for all the evil in the world. They also believe those same elites are seeking
to bring down Trump, whom they see as the world’s only hope to defeat the deep
state. QAnon has now brought the same conspiracy mentality to the coronavirus
crisis.
As a
researcher of online movements like QAnon, I use a combination of data science
and digital ethnography to research how extremist movements use technology to
create propaganda, recruit members to ideological causes, inspire acts of
violence or impact democratic institutions.
A
central component of QAnon is the crowdsourcing of narratives. This bottom-up
approach provides a fluid and ever changing ideology. My analysis of Twitter
shows from January to March, there was a 21 per cent increase (a total of
7,683,414 posts) in hashtags used by the QAnon community. This means the
misinformation they spread has the capacity to reach a wider audience.
For
instance, QAnon community influencers on Twitter promoted Miracle Mineral
Supplement as a way of preventing COVID-19. The toxic product was sold by the
Texas-based Genesis II Church of Health and Healing for US$45. The U.S. Food
and Drug Administration had previously issued a warning about the dangerous and
potentially life threatening side effects of the supplement.
In
January, QAnon was amplifying narratives on 8kun (the internet forum formally
known as 8chan), Facebook and Telegram (an encrypted instant messaging plaform)
about a false theory that Asians were more susceptible to the coronavirus and
that white people were immune to COVID-19. Not only are there racist undertones
associated with this disinformation, it minimizes the threat posed by the virus.
From
February until the second week of March, QAnon followed the lead of Trump in
downplaying the threat of the virus and calling it a hoax. They believed the
virus was a deep state plot to damage the president’s chance at re-election.
The QAnon community said those warning about the pandemic threat were trying to
detract from U.S. domestic politics, stop Trump rallies and remove all the
economic gains they contended had occurred during the Trump presidency.
After
the WHO upgraded COVID-19 to pandemic status and the U.S. announced it was
closing its borders to most people from Europe for 30 days, QAnon changed the
narrative again. Suddenly, QAnon thought the pandemic was something to
celebrate because it was a cover for the Trump administration’s secret plan to
arrest deep state agents.
Evangelicals
within the the QAnon movement viewed the pandemic as the promised coming of the
Kingdom of God on Earth. David Hayes, who is better known as the Praying Medic
and an influencer in the QAnon community with 300,000 YouTube subscribers, said
in a March 14 livestream that there was no reason to be concerned about
COVID-19. Hayes reassured his viewers that they may not be affected by the
disease because this was “spiritual warfare” — only those who have not been
chosen by God will be affected by the disease.
The
person known as Q, who spawned the QAnon movement, didn’t post anything online
about COVID-19 until March 23. Up until then, all of the medical
disinformation, hoaxes and downplaying of the pandemic had been sourced from
QAnon influencers and community.
In his
first post on the topic of COVID-19, Q pushed a conspiracy theory with racial
undertones about COVID-19 being a Chinese bioweapon and that the virus release
was a joint venture between China and the Democrats to stop Trump’s re-election
by destroying the economy.
The
QAnon conspiracies have created an environment of complacency among its
followers who aren’t taking the risks posed by the virus seriously.
Florida
pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, who has given credence to QAnon in the past and
has preached that the coronavirus was planned by the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, was arrested after holding Sunday services and disregarding
federal, state and county orders to limit gatherings to less than 10 people.
His conspiratorial beliefs led to his negligent actions, which put hundreds of
people from his congregation at risk.
In
another instance, right-wing media figures were spreading an “empty hospital”
conspiracy, downplaying the pandemic and its death toll.
A QAnon
account originally launched the #FilmYourHospital hashtag. This was amplified
by QAnon influencers such as former California congressional candidate DeAnna
Lorraine Tesoriero and QAnon influencer Liz Crokin. This hoax was then picked
up by mainstream right-wing media figures promoting COVID trutherism to a wider
audience.
The FBI
once called conspiracy theories spread by QAnon and others a “potential
domestic terrorism threat.” It’s time to call the infodemic a public health
threat.
By Marc-André
Argentino. The Conversation , April 8, 2020.
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