As QAnon (for Q Anonymous) has hit the mainstream media, more and more people are learning about the group of wacky—and dangerous—conspiracy theorists taking over the GOP. Even Dictator Donald Trump (DDT), after denying he knew anything about the group, admitted he thought the members were opposed to pedophilia. DDT approves of them because they don’t like pedophilia. (DDT’s deceased friend Jeffrey Epstein would be disappointed.) But QAnon is about much more than the insane belief DDT is the savior to stop a huge Satanic human-trafficking ring operated by Democrats including Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks.
QAnon’s latest announcement was a conversation-stopper—briefly. Members of the group expected DDT to announce John F. Kennedy Jr, who faked his death over 20 years ago, would replace Mike Pence as his running mate for vice president. What a pair! DDT and the son of President John F. Kennedy. QAnon members even wore special shirts at last Saturday’s rally for the grand presentation in Dallas. Sadly for them, JFK Jr was a no-show, but they would have been disappointed anyway. A staunch Democrat, JFK Jr was anti-racist and pro-gun control.
A former QAnon member who bailed from the group described it as “a community of people that radicalizes them into a world view, that just essentially detaches them from reality.” He has felt shame for his feelings while a member; i.e., the happiness of seeing Hillary Clinton dragged in front of a military tribunal, even though she’s a civilian.” He said:
“That still bothers me to this day, how willing and happy and joyfully I would have reacted to something that I would normally want no part in… This is how you get good people to do bad things.”
An FBI bulletin from May 2019 warns conspiracy theories like QAnon could “very likely” motivate criminal and sometimes violent activity.
At least 16 candidates running for Congress this year, some of them likely to win, are open QAnon members. Oregon’s GOP candidate for U.S. Senate, Jo Rae Perkins, held a rally including the author of two books about QAnon where maskless people clustered close together to hear the message about the wildfires fires being “part of the cover-up to keep guilty people’s crimes from coming to the public.”
Police officers following QAnon express surprise that their beliefs are controversial. Head of the NYPD union Ed Mullins gave a Fox interview displaying a QAnon coffee mug behind him.
GOP incumbents also support QAnon conspiracy theories, for example when Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) agreed with a rally participant that the number of reported COVID-19 deaths was far less than CDC reports. The House overwhelmingly approved a resolution condemning QAnon, but 17 Republicans voted against the measure and another 50 abstained. The Senate has not taken up the bill.
VP Mike Pence tentatively disavowed the QAnon philosophy, but he attended a Montana fundraiser with top GOP officials in mid-September at the home of a QAnon couple. The wealthy hosts have also been in communication with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). DDT has called QAnon Georgia candidate for the House Marjorie Taylor Greene a “future Republican star.” U.S. Senate candidate Kelly Loeffler enthusiastically accepted Greene’s endorsement. Greene was forced to remove a photo from her Facebook page showing her brandishing a semi-automatic rifle next to the faces of three freshmen congressional members of color: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). She also repeated the QAnon falsehood that “there’s never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon [on 9/11].”
Republican leadership mostly dodges questions about their connection to QAnon. On Fox, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel said the movement had nothing to do with the election despite DDT’s endorsement of the group at last week’s town hall and his retweeting its conspiracy theory about President Obama killing the entire Navy Seal Team 6 after he ordered them to fake the death of Osama bin Laden.
Many of the conspiracies come from the anti-Jewish pamphlet, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, myths collected and published in 1902. The book was used as a basis for Adolf Hitler’s takeover and the Holocaust; the Nazi children’s version of the Protocols was required reading in every German primary school. Its message of racism and anti-LGBTQ people was communicated by Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and the KKK.
QAnon follows the pattern of rational people following irrational conspiracy theory by being in groups, responding to terror, blaming scapegoats for misfortunes, and believing narcissistic demagogues will rescue them. Current situations being to resemble those of Europe in the 1930s including the growth of fascism and totalitarianism. Only World War II stopped those movements in democratic societies—until now with the rapidly growing neo-Nazi “QAon” movement using Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda to attack “globalists” and their allies.
DDT’s convention last summer matched the QAnon position of racism, devastation in violent crime in cities (the rate was falling until DDT’s most recent campaign), and nonexistent threats from fraudulent voting. The trade wars and huge corporate tax cuts made life worse for many people in the U.S. before he failed to stop the coronavirus when DDT moved from denial to quack remedies back to denial. Failing to solve any problems in the U.S., DDT created imaginary threats corresponding with his supporters’ prejudices on a foundation of their conspiracies building from fear and envy of know-it-all “elites.”
In How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Jason Stanley, Yale philosopher and scholar of propaganda, wrote about DDT building a cult of personality within the GOP and moved the U.S. toward authoritarianism.
“Fascism is a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed threats by leftist radicals, minorities and immigrants. He promises only he can save us.”
Sam Thielman compares QAnon to”a news-obsessed strain of Christian theology called premillennial dispensationalism, which takes metaphorical passages in the Bible and tries to decode them into both individual prophecies that refer directly to current events, as well as a larger meta-prophecy ending in the Rapture of believers to heaven, the coming of the Antichrist, and the battle of Armageddon.” Will Sommer with the Daily Beast wrote:
“QAnon is always sucking in new things that have happened. There was a weird light a couple of years ago off the coast of Oregon, and people were like, ‘Oh, that was a missile trying to take down Air Force One as Trump flew to North Korea.’ ”
Dave Hayes, called PrayingMedic on YouTube and Twitter, painstakingly related John Durham (U.S. attorney for Connecticut), QAnon material, and the deaths of Frank Cali of New York’s Gambino crime family and Anthony Comello, the man who shot Cali.
Under the pseudonym “Streiff,” William B. Crews, working for Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wrote and published radical right conspiracy theories. He accused Fauci and CDC Director Robert Redfield of making COVID-19 a plot to undermine DDT. Many federal employees, forced to work in DDT’s and Fox’s “alternative reality,” are driven past the point of reason. To make sense of their world, they create their own. Parallels come from the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and other regimes with propaganda versions when people are forced to believe in their truth. The U.S. has no concentration camps if people don’t follow the fantasy, but employees can lose their jobs.
QAnon followers can begin with fighting child abuse, ignoring the fact that 90 percent of abused children know their abusers and instead obsessing about human trafficking. The result, according to USA Today writer Jessica Guynn, is growing distrust in public institutions, pandemic-fueled social isolation and a no-holds-barred online culture that can instantly propel dangerous misinformation into the mainstream. QAnon members take the moral high ground by their image of defending children.
Another reason for QAnon is a search for the cause of the virus—maybe the 5G network or Bill Gates or the way pharmaceutical companies make money from drugs. The fear of disease makes people more emotionally open because feelings of being unsafe in crises lead some to find relief in conspiracy theories. People who swallow these falsehoods don’t practice critical thinking, searching in a number of sources to see if there’s any support for them.
Q Anonymous has decided to go anonymous in September because the conspiracy theories aren’t welcome on social media. Usually in fake code, an anonymous Q account wrote, “Deploy camouflage. Drop all references re: ‘Q’ ‘Qanon’ etc. to avoid ban/termination.” Dropping the brand is also a way to get more followers such as the “antifa” setting last month’s fires in the Northwest, rumors debunked by local authorities and FBI, but believed by people who consider themselves militia members.
Changing the subject: The presidential debate Thursday may be more civilized than the first one. The Commission on Presidential Debates will mute microphones to give both DDT and Biden two UNINTERRUPTED minutes for their answers. Last time the idea was tossed round, DDT said he wouldn’t attend the debate if that happened, the polling has made him desperate. Topics for the 15-minute segments, agreed on months ago, are the DDT and Biden records, Supreme Court, Covid-19, economy, race and violence in cities, and integrity of the election. An analysis of the two sides on these subjects. DDT also objects to Kristen Welker as an “unfair” moderator, and his campaign manager wants the topics changed to make foreign policy the central focus. They have fewer than three days to settle their problems.