Commentary: QAnon – how a conspiracy-consuming community persists, despite its leader going MIA
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Commentary: QAnon – how a conspiracy-consuming customs persists, despite its leader going MIA
From its humble beginnings in drops posted past a prophet-similar figure on 4chan, QAnon has evolved to become a social motility that continues to thrive despite being driven underground, says William Cooper.
In this Aug 2, 2022 file photo, a protesters holds a Q sign waits in line with others to enter a campaign rally with President Donald Trump in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. (Photo: AP/Matt Rourke)
fifteen Jun 2022 09:56AM (Updated: nineteen Jun 2022 06:00AM)
TRUCKEE, California: It has been half dozen months since Q posted a drop but the once-tiny motility he ignited – QAnon – has arguably simply grown stronger.
Some of Q'south most diehard followers are still clinging to the idea that Donald Trump will make a stunning render to vanquish his enemies and repossess his stolen ballot.
A new written report released but this week by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security warned that QAnon adherents could target Democrats and other political opponents for more violence as the move'due south fake prophecies don't come truthful.
Information technology has likewise been barely a week since disgraced sometime national security counselor Michael Flynn - who received a presidential pardon while Trump was in office - suggested a military coup to prevent Joe Biden from taking office would accept been appropriate. He has since walked back on those comments made at a Dallas event for QAnon supporters.
Such remarks should come as little surprise when antics of talking big has been role and parcel of the QAnon playbook.
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Even when the US presidential ballot results were unequivocally pointing to a Biden-Harris win, lawyer Sidney Powell - who was part of Donald Trump'due south legal squad – had played to QAnon supporters in calling the instance she was mounting a "kraken" that, when released, would erase the possibility that Joe Biden won the presidency.
It turned out to be a stack of documents spewing conspiracy theories including the idea that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez'south family owned the technology company Dominion Voting systems that supposedly rigged the election – all of which turned out to exist baseless allegations.
QANON'S Humble Beginnings
QAnon emerged as a fringe grouping at the margins of American society in late 2022 after Trump was elected president.
It started with a mail by an private going by the moniker Q Clearance Patriot on an Internet message board hosted by 4chan, who then migrated to other message boards 8chan and then 8kun.
Q is often thought of by his followers as a senior US regime official with access to highly classified and confidential data relating to Trump's effort to bring down a global liberal conduce.
Q's existent identity has never been established, though there has no lack of speculation almost who he is, including the possibility that Q is a group of people acting in concert
At some bespeak, people thought Steve Bannon was Q. A few also suspected Trump was Q. And afterward the Q: Into the Storm premiered on HBO before this yr, others thought Ron Watkins, the 8kun site administrator was it.
As if the identify of the group's leader wasn't mysterious plenty, what was in those messages he left - the drops - were even stranger.
From 2022 to 2020, Q had posted more than v,000 pretty ambiguous messages. They were wildly appealing to followers considering of their intriguing nature – from the enticing alleged ties to the US government and suggestions of sensitive, highly classified government information not normally available to ordinary Americans to the draw of ambiguously worded messages that left ample room for the imagination.
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QAnon supporters spent and so much time trying to decipher and analyse what these drops meant, there were even YouTube channels of QAnon influencers who defended themselves to breaking each one down.
Fifty-fifty so, QAnon adherents are a diverse bunch. At the extreme are those who believe in the most deranged set of Internet conspiracy theories, including allegations that quondam President Donald Trump was battling an aristocracy group of Satan worshiping pedophiles in the deep country.
To them, this group of global elites includes leading liberal figures in the U.s.a. such as Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and a number of others on Wall Street and in Hollywood.
Many QAnon supporters too believe that Trump was recruited to run for president past top military leaders in lodge to interruption upwards this criminal band and send its members to jail. They however believe these liberals will eventually be imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay and face the prospect of execution.
Then there are other supporters who only subscribe to QAnon's broader principles of distrusting establishment narratives and questioning the information presented by traditionally authoritative sources.
HOW QANON JUMPED INTO THE MAINSTREAM
Since 2017, QAnon has jumped from message boards in the dark corners of the Internet to stories in the US media and Trump rallies, and claimed a large following for itself.
Its leap to Reddit on a customs called Calm Earlier The Storm tapped into a larger base, where supporters drove discussions amongst subscribers to amplify Q's drops and QAnon matters.
QAnon also spilled into the real world and raised a ruckus, from disobeying COVID-xix rules to staging confrontations with Black Lives Matter protesters and culminating in the January storming of the US Capitol.
QAnon constitute legitimacy despite the disorder and disinformation information technology perpetrated - in United states of america Republican representatives Marjorie Taylor Light-green speaking upwards openly in support of the group and when and then-President Trump retweeted accounts with links to the grouping.
Indeed, the group may only be getting fifty-fifty more traction as Trump beingness out of the White House gives them a crusade to really rally backside.
Biden'due south inauguration should accept decimated the movement when QAnon supporters had preached that Biden and other Democrat criminals would be arrested and executed on the orders of Trump past January xx, an event they call "The Tempest", but it nonetheless continues to hold strong amid its most ardent supporters.
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WHAT SHOULD BE Done?
The same place to understand where QAnon rose is where to look to effigy out how to diminish it: The Internet.
While Q's letters were initially published on fringe message boards, social media giants including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube amplified the message by providing a platform for followers and believers to utilise every bit megaphones.
This yr, however, these leading Internet companies have taken steps to ban QAnon content from their websites, in part fuelled by the events of Jan half-dozen and in role because the grouping was no longer associated with the human being occupying the White House.
Although these crackdowns have pushed QAnon supporters and their deranged fantasies off those platforms, still, that has only succeeded in driving them underground where they cannot be tracked.
Many have establish new ways to flourish on Telegram where encrypted chats with tens of thousands of followers mean parties wondering into their channels may find themselves in rabbit holes of even crazier, interconnected conspiracies where people tin talk over their delusional beliefs 24/vii and feed off each. It is a deranged flywheel accelerating each twenty-four hours.
Mayhap that is where the danger lies. When opponents take steps to limit QAnon's influence, these simply seem to fuel its growth and intensity.
QAnon supporters are undoubtedly infecting mainstream political attitudes. A contempo poll past NPR found that 17 per cent of Americans believe that "a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex activity band are trying to control our politics and media", while virtually 37 per cent didn't know if they were existent or not.
QAnon has moved beyond a political motility to become a social customs that engages, entertains and provides structure and organisation to brand sense of their globe in a manner other U.s.a. social institutions exercise non seem to reach.
The question is thus not whether QAnon will nonetheless exist a part of American society but rather how influential a fixture in American guild it will exist.
(Listen to Prof Chan Heng Chee and BowerGroupAsia Managing Director James Carouso explain how America came to be and so deeply divided amongst a bitterly fought election on CNA's Heart of the Affair podcast episode published in November 2020.)
William Cooper is a global commentator on U.s.a. politics and an attorney based in Truckee, California. He is likewise author of the forthcoming Toxic: Donald Trump and the Dominion of Law by Blackness Spring Printing in London.
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