If You’re Into Eating Children’s Brains, You’ve Got a Four-Year Free Ride: A QAnon Bedtime Story (Part 4)

It’s worth noting that not all of QAnon’s early “fans” were completely taken in by the scam. After the first part of my QAnon series was published by Salon, I received an email from an associate who participated live in the very first Q post when it popped up out of nowhere on 4chan in November of 2017. In retrospect, he had this to say about the experience:

I've been front row for Q since day 1. The first Q post was a series of questions posted by someone claiming to be an insider. The gist was that we now finally have an insider at the highest levels, letting us know that for the first time, someone was actually going to take a run at the ruling class (deep state). I can't recall with perfect certainty, but among the couple things this first Q post mentioned was that Michael Flynn was a victim of a coup attempt, and that we should trust that there are people in Trump's inner circle who are aware of this, and that we needed to be patient as they needed to navigate this extremely carefully and quietly if anything was to ever come of it . . . none of the more fantastical demon pedophile stuff was part of Q in the beginning, beyond some pretty anodyne stuff about trust in god/the truth shall reveal . . .

Anyway, what gave this LARP some legs was that someone started posting pics from clearly inside the white house. It was early in xmas season, and I think it was the day (or day after) they started putting up xmas decorations around the white house, and someone was posting pics of the decorations, which we were able to correlate to official images of the white house xmas. someone was clearly there snapping pics and, on 4chan, since everybody is lying and larping all the time, the custom is to post proof by timestamping the pics. So, for example, people will write down the day's date, the time, and "/pol//" and include it in the photo. When people challenged the person posting the pics, more pics were posted with various forms of timestamps. It was pretty clear that there was at least one person physically in the white house at least for this moment who read or was somewhat familiar with /pol/ and /pol/ culture. Of course, it could have been an elaborate ruse (never put anything past internet nerds), but the board seemed to generally accept the pics poster as legit, acceptance that is not easily won nor freely given around those parts.

Note that the xmas pics thing happened in a separate thread later that day or the next day, NOT in the original Q post. The xmas pics person was not Q and never claimed to be Q, BUT the xmas pics poster did tell us that Q was legit. But it wasn't an explicit confirmation. It was more like, yes, there are now people on the inside who will challenge the old ruling order, that there are people within Trump/Bannon's orbit who do want to actually make changes in Washington, and that the original Q post seemed to be at least correctly familiar with what was going on in that particular scene. So, this gave us all a whiff that there was something of substance here beyond typical 4chan shenanigans.

From there, it took off like wildfire. It was a perfect storm sort of thing, triggering a lot of confirmation bias, etc. Q posts started coming in non-stop. And, of course, they quickly became more and more insane. And, the way 4chan works, nobody actually knows if any subsequent Q posts were written by the original Q. Some tried to imitate the style/voice of the original, and many were clearly just people goofing around. It's very possible that the original Q never posted again ever. Suddenly, everybody was Q. They called it Q-posting. It was just a giddy sort of fun. Also, part of the culture of /pol/ is to say and "prove" the most outlandish possible things - the more ridiculous the claim, and the more flimsy and circumstantial the "evidence," the better. And when some hapless goof would come along and try to push back against the veracity of our claims, we would double and triple and quadruple down. That was the game. To this day, one of my friend groups constantly jokes about adrenochrome, the more outlandish the better. Are you aware that fear improves the purity and potency of adrenochrome production? That's why the missing kids are tortured and raped and kept alive in underground facilities. . .

This was all fun and games while it was contained on /pol/. The problem is that 4chan, and ESPECIALLY /pol/, culture is near impenetrable to outsiders. It's so many inside jokes and layers of irony and tongue-in-cheek. Normal people living normal lives are just not mentally equipped to even begin to comprehend this stuff. . .

Is there another example of a big conspiracy theory that started as an inside joke?

The answer: Yes. In fact, I covered this in Chapter One of my first book, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form (2012). The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (one of the main texts used by the Nazis to justify the Holocaust) began as a satire entitled Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which was written by Maurice Joly and published in France in 1865. If you want to read a clear, concise account of how Joly’s work was hijacked by the Nazis and transformed into one of the most effective propaganda tools in modern history, I highly recommend Will Eisner’s 2005 nonfiction graphic novel, The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Léo Taxil’s Les Mystères de la Franc-Maçonnerie, which was published in France a couple of decades after Joly’s book, attributed all kinds of outrageously lurid and supernatural-tinged sex crimes to the Freemasons. Taxil intended the book to be a satire on the extreme paranoia running rampant among devout Catholics regarding any “unorthodox” group not affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church.

More recently, in the latter half of the twentieth century, we have the case of Leonard Lewin’s Report from Iron Mountain (1967), which satirized the extremes to which the U.S. government might go to keep the war machine churning even during times of peace. In the book, a fictional government task force called “Iron Mountain 15” dreams up various methods of “invisible warfare” in order to keep the economy on an even keel, including staging terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and elaborately faking invasions from outer space.

Of course, it’s possible that the QAnon phenomenon began as satire as well. If so, somebody very quickly realized how useful this “joke” could be and decided to exploit it as a readymade propaganda tool. It’s also possible that QAnon was generated from the very beginning as a means to divide the country, sow seeds of fear and paranoia among the populace, and propel Trump back into the White House. If the latter function was its central goal, it did not succeed; however, one should be concerned about how very close it came to doing precisely that.

Here’s an excerpt from a November 10, 2020 Washington Post article by Drew Harwell and Craig Timberg:

Rita Katz, the executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism, said she expects the QAnon following will continue to grow online, regardless of who created or operated its presence online.

“It’s a dangerous network. It’s a dangerous movement that truly believes that Biden and other Democrats are killing kids,” Katz said. “And now, with Biden’s projected victory, the QAnon movement believes with the same zealous certainty that the whole thing is a sham. And that’s a major problem, because . . . these aren’t a bunch of harmless keyboard warriors—they’re adherents of a movement that has resulted in real-life violence.”

The FBI said last year that QAnon and other “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists” represented a major terrorism threat. Its supporters have been linked to kidnapping plots and violent threats, including in 2018, when an armed man in Arizona barricaded a bridge at the Hoover Dam with an armored truck.

QAnon followers have more recently pushed one another to keep the faith. On the far-right message board Gab, one user reposted a Q drop from June: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

For some core QAnon believers, who call themselves “digital soldiers,” the election seemed to fuel new calls for violent action in the real world.

“WAR,” one QAnon account wrote shortly after the race had been called on Saturday, in a tweet that has been retweeted more than 1,000 times. “Patriots will handle from here,” it read, alongside a “storm” emoji.¹³

The cognitive dissonance among the QAnon crowd has never been more pronounced than right now. Given the extreme state of denial in which these people have placed themselves, I would not have been at all surprised if, at the moment Joe Biden placed his hand on the Bible and was sworn in as the forty-sixth President of the United States, willfully blind followers like Rick Rene would take to the internet and insist, “Don’t believe the fake news, my friends! That’s not Sleepy Joe! No! That’s just a hologram! It’s really Trump in disguise! He’s been planning this all along! He’s succeeded in fooling the Deep State at last! We win! We win!”

Despite the fact that Biden has now been sworn in as President, I suspect Trump and his most ardent followers aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Obviously, Trump has left the White House, but he’s not going to leave the spotlight. Thousands of U.S. citizens are convinced that Trump is the real President of the United States. I can see it now: Trump moving out of the U.S., launching his own streaming channel, and trying to govern his acolytes from some “shithole country” via Zoom, just another in a long line of would-be dictators forced to flee his country of origin in the middle of the night after a bungled coup attempt. No, the “Fake News” Era isn’t quite over yet.

So what’s the answer to this precarious situation? Is it to “deplatform” all of Trump’s followers on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube? I doubt such an authoritarian move will solve anything. When has suppressing anyone’s point of view, whether inaccurate or not, solved any problem?

In the words of Kate Ruane, a senior legislative counsel at the ACLU:

For months, President Trump has been using social media platforms to seed doubt about the results of the election and to undermine the will of voters. We understand the desire to permanently suspend him now, but it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions—especially when political realities make those decisions easier. President Trump can turn to his press team or Fox News to communicate with the public, but others—like many Black, Brown, and LGTBQ activists who have been censored by social media companies—will not have that luxury. It is our hope that these companies will apply their rules transparently to everyone.¹⁴

Ask yourself: When has suppression ever resulted in the weakening of any movement? Can you name a time when slamming a boot down on an idea didn’t end up making that idea even more resilient? At what time in history have religious fanatics not loved martyrs? Suppression only makes the extremists even more convinced that their point of view is the correct one. “Otherwise, how come the Democrat-controlled media’s trying so hard to crack down on us?!” “Rick B2T” is saying exactly those words on his podcast even as I write this. It surprises me, perhaps more so recently, when otherwise rational adults—supporters of the First Amendment in almost all other circumstances—refuse to see the inevitable result of censorious stratagems like this.

In fact, it causes me to wonder if someone, somewhere, doesn’t have a vested interest in making certain that the flames of extremism don’t die out in America quite so quickly. After all, why let an angry mob filled with unthinking extremists go to waste?

The most workable solution, of course, is to push back against lies with truth. Despite the seemingly impenetrable madness of QAnon, the cracks in the psyop are growing wider by the second.

As one QAnon proponent wrote on 8kun, not long after Election Day, “HOW CAN I SPEAK TO Q???? MY FAITH IS SHAKEN. I FOLLOWED THE PLAN. TRUMP LOST!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT NOW?????? WHERE IS THE PLAN???”¹⁵

Sorry, my friend. “THE PLAN” has run out of funds. Team QAnon has moved on to other assignments. You need to power this live action roleplaying game on your own steam now. Someone needs to step up and take the reins, right? It might as well be you. Wrack your brains. Think about it. What other innocent people can you stalk and harass online, then in the real world, with baseless accusations while telling yourself you’re doing it all for Mom, God, and Apple Pie? The Earth has no shortage of vulnerable targets. Just go looking for one or two or three. You’ll be sure to find them.

As long as the potential targets far outnumber the larping stalkers, your chosen profession will be secure for the foreseeable future.

No matter which scarecrow occupies the White House.