America reckons with the most powerful conspiracy theory it’s ever seen. But it’s all been seen before.
by Mauve Maude
December 11, 2020
Four years ago, after the election of the President, half of America was in a state of shock. Although the President had lost the popular vote, he had beaten Hillary Clinton with the same electoral spread by which he himself lost this fall. Liberal America was stunned, completely taken aback at what had happened. And although most had never previously expected it to happen within their lifetime, many predicted the complete downfall of American democracy would have occurred by this time. As bizarre as that sounded, it didn’t quite cover what would happen the next fall.
In the fall of 2017, an anonymous 4chan poster claiming to be a top-level government agent, a Q-level (top secret) military official who called himself simply “Q Clearance Patriot”, or “Q”, began disseminating, ostensibly via his top-secret government position, a conspiracy story. This story, released to the anonymous public in continual “drops”, would grow with frightening speed into an intricately connected web of conspiracy theories we now know as QAnon. A short three dozen or so months later, the other half of America is in shock. And six percent of the voting electorate now believe that Hillary Clinton and Friends (a long list of liberal politicians, celebrities, and religious figures forming a “deep state”) are a baby-blood-drinking cabal of pedophiles who aim to dominate the entire planet. The President, allegedly (according to Q’s top-secret knowledge), was asked by military officials to take the Presidency and bring the deep state to justice.
Six percent of the voting electorate now believe that Hillary Clinton and Friends are a baby-blood-drinking cabal of pedophiles who aim to dominate the entire planet.
Being suspicious of such a tale–or the government, for that matter, either one–a citizen might question whether or not the 2016 election victory was then somehow engineered, much like, as the Q crowd argues, the 2020 election. If this mission was so crucially important that the President had to be secretly recruited to run, why leave it up to the electorate? Come to think of it, they also might ask why Q thought everybody needed to know about this top-secret mission if the President and the government were so on top of it. Whose side is Q on? We’ll explore. Though there is supposedly video and photo documentation (doctored) to prove these accusations against the deep state, for some reason nobody has seen anything credible, or rather, it’s been expertly covered up, by the deep state themselves. But then, it is very difficult to prove or disprove something that’s never happened. But if it hasn’t been disproved, it’s true, right? Confused yet? Welcome to the following of the anonymous Q. We haven’t even really gotten started. But before we do, let’s go ahead and note that two Congressional races are sending QAnon-supporting candidates to Congress this winter.
Also, before we do, let me be 100% clear. I don’t intend to make a case for QAnon, and I know no QAnon believers need me to do so. Many tenets of the QAnon belief system are antithetical to our mission here. What I do hope to do, is to figure out how America can get that 6% off the ledge. Because something has certainly gone terribly wrong, and it’s gone a little bit further than baby blood Internet campfire stories at this point.
So, how do millions of American adults so readily believe that the liberal elite are a baby-eating, sex-trafficking cult from whom the President was sent to save the country, and that Q was just the only person willing to speak out about it, for undetermined reasons?
It’s not a simple answer (and it won’t be answered by the end of this article either). But this Smithsonian article explains from a folkloric standpoint, what these stories are based on, how long they’ve actually been told, and why. It also makes use of this article explaining exactly what and why 4chan is, if you’re not acquainted (and maybe don’t want to be).
Dr. Joe Pierre, author of Psych Unseen: Brain, Behavior, and Belief, wrote a three-part series for Psychology Today, on how to handle loved ones who’ve fallen into the QAnon trance. Psychologists seem to agree that QAnon believers fit a certain profile, one that aches for certainty and uniqueness.
It turns out yarns like these serve a very special purpose for fearful, wayward souls, and tend to popularize in times of crisis and uncertainty. Most would agree our current times are overqualified for that description. Mix in the hypermedia function of our modern society, and you have a very well distributed conspiracy theory folktale for the worried masses. This one in particular has resulted, and is resulting in real-world consequences. QAnon has become a very real issue. In fact, Democratic Senators just recently requested a full QAnon threat assessment from the FBI.
But what already seems to be clear in the last several months, is that believers in numerous strains of American conspiracy thought, have begun to unify under a sort of far-right QAnon umbrella. Pandemic conspiracy theorists, vaccine conspiracy theorists, election conspiracy theorists, Antifa conspiracy theorists, and white nationalists–all seem to be mingling, collecting, and spurring each other on in unflinching support of the President, regardless of facts or evidence.
And the major question has never been answered: who’s responsible? Who is Q? This ABC article investigates the people who might at least be able to pinpoint that identity or identities: the administrators of the latest “chan” sites themselves, Jim and Ron Watkins, who continue to reap real profits from QAnon mania. Of course, they vehemently deny either knowing or being the mysterious Q.
So the question for now is just what to do with our people? Since the QAnon demographic leans overwhelmingly to the right, the rational right would appear to be the first line of defense. Though it can be difficult to pull back friends and loved ones from this particular kind of mentality, we do know without a doubt this phenomenon has reached religious people across the nation–Edgar Maddison Welch of Pizzagate fame being one–and even whole church fellowships. So The Christian Post has a few ideas on how America’s religious can respond.
In the meantime, it looks like this story will be unfolding for quite some time.