Outlandish conspiracy theory or dangerous global cult?
‘The reason QAnon works,’ says Joseph Uscinski, associate professor of political science at the University of Miami and co-author of the book American Conspiracy Theories, ‘is that it has largely piggybacked on to existing conspiracy tropes, and espouses ideas a lot of people have already bought into.
‘The idea of elites eating babies has been around for millennia; the idea of a deep state working against the president is the plot of Oliver Stone’s JFK, which came out 30 years ago. About 50 per cent of Americans buy into the deep state idea; about a third think that there is elite sex-trafficking going on. All of these ideas predate QAnon.’
The difference is that while the paranoia may be timeless, social media has provided a platform for Q’s theories to flourish, spreading them far beyond those predisposed to believe. Research published by the BBC in October found that QAnon had generated more than 100 million comments, shares and likes on social media sites this year. The biggest QAnon groups on Facebook had generated 44 million comments, shares and likes – that’s about two thirds the number of reactions generated by Black Lives Matter groups.
In May 2019, the FBI released a memo listing QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat, linking the conspiracy to multiple violent incidents and threats of violence, including a man accused of murdering his brother with a sword, a man who reportedly threatened to kill YouTube employees, and an armed man who blocked the Hoover Dam with an armoured vehicle.
By then, people had begun showing up at Trump rallies wearing T-shirts and brandishing placards bearing QAnon slogans, and Trump himself had begun to apparently court the conspiracy, alive to the support it was gaining among his voting base.
A survey by Media Matters, a left-of-centre not-for-profit organisation that monitors right-wing media, and which has tracked QAnon postings since the beginning, revealed that as of 30 October 2020 Trump had retweeted postings promoting Q-related conspiracy theories at least 265 times. Additionally, members of Trump’s family, campaign staffers, and current and former Trump administration officials have also repeatedly amplified QAnon supporters and their content.
In August, responding to a question about QAnon and its supporters, Trump replied that he ‘appreciate[d]’ that ‘they like me very much’, adding that ‘these are people that love our country’. When a reporter noted that the conspiracy theory’s premise is that Trump is ‘secretly saving the world from this satanic cult of paedophiles and cannibals,’ Trump replied, ‘But is that supposed to be a bad thing or good thing? If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it. I’m willing to put myself out there.’
To its followers, Trump’s reluctance to distance himself from the movement has been taken as endorsement. ‘#Qanon’s intel drops are approved by President Trump and the proofs provided here will debunk any claims otherwise,’ reads one posting on the Qproofs site – ‘A collection of QAnon evidence provided by Anonymous Patriots’. There has even been speculation in some quarters of the movement that Trump himself is Q.
Media Matters counted no fewer than 97 candidates running in the Congressional primaries who had either endorsed or given credence to QAnon ideas, 26 of whom ended up on the ballot.
The most prominent is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a House seat in Georgia, and who had posted numerous videos promoting QAnon theories, including one calling ‘Q’ a ‘patriot’ and ‘worth listening to’. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Greene also posted a series of tweets defending QAnon, including one – subsequently deleted – encouraging her followers to message her with questions so she could ‘walk you through the whole thing’.
However in August 2020, in an interview on Fox TV, as her campaign for Congress gathered pace, Greene refuted suggestions that she was running as a ‘QAnon candidate’, saying that after discovering ‘misinformation’ on the site she had chosen ‘another path’. Greene did not respond to requests from the Telegraph for an interview.
She will be joined in Congress by another Republican, Lauren Boebert, the owner of a restaurant named Shooters Grill in the town of Rifle in Colorado, who has stopped short of describing herself as a QAnon follower but said in one interview, ‘Everything that I’ve heard of Q, I hope that this is real because it only means that America is getting stronger and better, and people are returning to conservative values.’