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by
Will Sommer
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March 28 - April 17, 2023
Since the cabal causes all wars, world peace would reign once its leaders are arrested. And because the cabal controls the financial system, a post-cabal world would mean an end to credit card and student loan debt.
Trump supporters who signed up for QAnon were joining a biblical struggle between good and evil. They described themselves as divine warriors given a task from God to target specific people they saw as devils on the earth:
It’s a symptom of the world we live in, a product of unchecked social media platforms, a crumbling education system, rampant political polarization, and the crumbling of offline communities. Q’s followers have responded to modern life by retreating into a violent fantasy that exists parallel to the real world. QAnon isn’t a one-time phenomenon. Instead, it’s just the start of the all-consuming conspiracy theory movements to come. Unless something changes, QAnon is a glimpse into our future.
Support for QAnon rises among more conservative groups. Twenty-seven percent of white evangelical Christians in the AEI poll, for example, said QAnon’s claims were at least mostly correct.
It comes with an entire religious and political agenda, a call for a world cleansed of everyone standing in the way of Trump and his supporters.
QAnon is a dark dream about sanctioned violence against political and cultural enemies. It threatens to undermine democracy, laying the groundwork for an authoritarian takeover justified on the grounds that Democrats and other liberals are child-eating pedophiles. How, QAnon believers ask, can we coexist with people like that?
QAnon emerged in 2017 as a coping mechanism for Trump voters troubled by his stalled presidency. It was a fairy tale for people wondering why Trump hadn’t fulfilled his promises, recasting the struggling president as a hero of biblical proportions. But QAnon is also incredibly weird, and, to anyone outside of its influence, clearly delusional. That put Trump and his retainers in a bind as QAnon grew: How could they avoid alienating Q supporters and costing Trump votes in the process, while also making sure Trump didn’t become known more broadly as the QAnon candidate?
For Anons, Trump is a figure of messianic proportions, sent to destroy the pedophile cabal, usher in a thousand-year peace, cure diseases, and absolve their debts. To mark his primacy in their canon, they call him “Q+”—an even bigger deal than Q.
On August 1, 2019, Yahoo News reported that the FBI considered QAnon a potential source of domestic terrorism. In a memo circulated to other law enforcement agencies, the FBI wrote that QAnon and other conspiracy theories would drive “both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts.”
Canadian extremism and religion expert Amarnath Amarasingam,
New World Order—the idea that shadowy forces were conspiring to make a single world government and turn ordinary people into serfs.
But most important, they had decided that QAnon was less about Q, and more about the beliefs Q and his followers had created together: their shared understanding of a world controlled by a Satanic pedophile cabal that could only be vanquished violently by Donald Trump.
Before the internet, a lone crank pushing strange ideas might have struggled to find allies in his neighborhood, or even his town. But on social media, conspiracy theorists can search the world for people who agree with them.
“It becomes who you are.”
QAnon was near death when the coronavirus arrived. With 8chan down after the El Paso shooting, Q was homeless. His followers had no leadership and no way to get the Q spin on current events.
Q had promised for almost three years that globe-shaking events were just around the horizon.
At its core, QAnon is about distrusting institutions. The media, the government, and big business are all out to get you and your kids. The only people you can trust are Q and Trump.
When their predictions fail to come true, though, they commit to their beliefs even more, stunning people outside the movement who could see that they had been fooled. The question of why people believe conspiracy theories, even hurting their own interests in the process, has become a pressing one in a time where conspiracy theorists commit violence, destroy family relationships, and encourage one another to refuse vaccines.
conspiracy theories have been a powerful force in American politics and culture since before the country’s founding, all the way back to the Salem Witch Trials.
Joseph Uscinski, a University of Miami professor who has been at the forefront of research on QAnon, summed up conspiracy theories in 2014 with a colleague as “an explanation of historical, ongoing, or future events that cites as a main causal factor a small group of powerful persons, the conspirators, acting in secret for their own benefit against the common good.” Another academic definition holds that a conspiracy theory is “a text that falsely accuses a group of individuals of orchestrating a plot that has harmed or will harm society.”
The appeal of the belief that unseen, malevolent forces control the world isn’t restricted by racial, gender, or class boundaries. Blaming personal failings on the misdeeds of an unseen cabal has an obvious emotional appeal, relieving a person of taking responsibility for their own problems. It’s also a simple way to explain a complex world. Rather than accept that random, chaotic, deadly events can happen out of nowhere, the believer can simplify the world by blaming tragic events on a conspiracy.
a “superconspiracy,” a conspiracy theory that explains dozens of lesser conspiracy theories by blaming all of the events on what Barkun calls a “distant but all-powerful evil force.”
The names of the villains have changed, but the human desire to believe in a single powerful force controlling the world remains.
Researchers have struggled to find what makes certain people more likely to support and believe in conspiracy theories. Some research suggests that people with Manichean worldviews who see the world as more black-and-white are more likely to support conspiracy theories. Other factors that indicate a tendency toward conspiracism include preferences for strict hierarchies, holding a dark view of human nature and higher distrust of other people, and viewing the world as a jungle where “the strong dominate the weak.” Conspiracy theory believers often display obsessions with the sufferings of their
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As a way of seeing the world, conspiracy theories offer their believers a chance to feel smarter than the average person, giving them a sense of agency or at least understanding over events that often seem totally out of control.
Another group of researchers found that conspiracy theorists are much more likely than the average person to support political violence.
They often seem angry about the state of the world and their place in it. Conversely, they get a special pleasure in the knowledge they think Q has shared with them, reveling in the secrets that set them apart from the average person. As one believer put it to me with a smile, they know the news before everyone else. In a confusing world, a conspiracy theory like QAnon gives people something to put their faith in. “Many of them are perfectly normal,” Barkun said of conspiracy theorists. “It would be nice to say, ‘Well, they’re all crazy people,’ but they’re not.”
NESARA and QAnon both fall into a category of political or religious movement called millenarianism: the belief that a utopian world is right around the corner.
When conspiracy theories fail to come true, supporters are faced with a choice: admit they were wrong and deal with the humiliation, or commit to their beliefs even further.
a symptom of larger fears about social change,
adrenochrome. To the most radicalized QAnon believers, this elusive substance can only be found in the brains of children who have been sexually tortured in Satanic rituals and is highly sought after for its energizing qualities.
Adrenochrome is a real substance, created in the body when adrenaline is oxidized. In the 1960s, researchers speculated that it could be somehow linked to the appearance of schizophrenia. But adrenochrome’s place in QAnon lore appears to truly derive from its unearned position in counterculture fiction as the ultimate psychedelic, a stand-in for a mythical illicit substance described in books like Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.
The cabal wouldn’t need to create a global harvesting network to get their hands on adrenochrome. Since it relies on the simple process of oxidizing adrenaline, anyone with an adrenaline-filled EpiPen meant to fight allergic reactions could expose the adrenaline to oxygen to create the drug.
QAnon is unmatched among modern American conspiracy theories in its ability to inspire violence. As of September 2021, 101 QAnon followers had been inspired to commit crime by their beliefs, a list that includes 61 defendants from the Capitol riot, according to data compiled by University of Maryland researchers. No other conspiracy theory, from 9/11 trutherism to birtherism, gets even close to inspiring that level of violence.
“This is far beyond the Republican community,” Jake said. “This is so far beyond what you think of as the far right.”
Reddit’s “QAnon Casualties” board.
there’s no guaranteed way to dissuade a QAnon believer. “The reality is that we don’t really know what really works or if anything does work to get someone out of QAnon,” Dr. Joseph M. Pierre, a University of California, Los Angeles, psychiatrist who has studied QAnon, told me.
One thing experts who have studied QAnon exit methods almost all agree on is that the most obvious and temporarily satisfying option—a full-frontal debunking assault—is also the worst. Reacting to a QAnon believer’s claims with anger, ridicule, and insults about tin-foil hats will only cause them to shut down or sever the relationship. Many QAnon believers are drawn to the conspiracy theory because they feel marginalized or disrespected, according to Dannagal Young, a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware who researches what drives people to believe in
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Instead, the people left grieving in QAnon’s wake are generally encouraged to keep the relationship going and avoid mentioning Q.
Rather than directly confronting a QAnon believer, Young and other deradicalization researchers suggest a less direct approach that relies on just getting them away, mentally and physically, from QAnon. Take them for a walk or a dinner, or anything else that gets them offline. Young suggests reminding them of positive memories from the past to help them see themselves as existing beyond QAnon.
He came to believe that many people were drawn into QAnon because of a lack of social connections in their real world, leaving them hunting for community online instead. To come out of it, they would need to see that social connection they were looking for outside of QAnon.
Like other experts, Heffernan agrees that the best option is being emotionally available for a QAnon supporter when they reach that epiphany on their own. “I don’t think that it’s something that you can pull somebody out of,” Heffernan told me. “I think they have to be ready to leave it.”
“It didn’t die with Trump like I thought it would,” David told me. “The critical thinking that doesn’t take place is astonishing.”
QAnon leader and John F. Kennedy Jr. impersonator Juan O. Savin has organized a multistate coalition of candidates for secretary of state positions who would hold crucial power over elections if they win.
“post-truth nihilism.” They saw reality as a multiple-choice question, where you could select the facts you most preferred.
you could choose whatever was most comfortable to believe.
People trying to grapple with the meaning of QAnon often call it a cult. There are obvious similarities, from the fact that these ideas could grow in a new follower’s mind to become the most important thing in their lives, to the way that leaders within the movement encourage members to cut off skeptical family members. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, one of the country’s leading cult researchers, has three criteria he uses for any group to be considered a cult: a “charismatic leader,” methods of “thought reform” aimed at changing how followers think in ways that keep them in the cult, and the
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“thought-terminating clichés” meant to stop QAnon believers from questioning the movement. Lifton explains thought-terminating clichés as “highly reductive, definite-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed” that can be repeated to prevent deeper thought. In QAnon, believers tell one another to “trust the plan” when everything in the world suggests there is no plan. When a Q prophecy fails to come true, they reassure themselves with the phrase “disinformation is necessary”—meaning that whatever QAnon prediction failed was really just a ruse posted by Q to confuse his enemies.
easy marks falling for a false prophet.
Those attempts to underplay their QAnon affiliations, along with the group’s banishment from social media, can make it hard to gauge how strong the conspiracy theory remains without Q.
