I made a Twitter thread last weekend about resources to learn about QAnon, the conspiracy theory that — even if you think it’s totally stupid and insane, which it is — has probably already captured the mind and heart of at least one person you love. It’s more cult than conspiracy theory, centered around the notion that Donald Trump is the head of a task force dedicated to taking down a shadowy cabal of pedophiles, all Democrats. (It’s a lot more than that — it’s also deeply anti-Semitic, for starters — but that’s the gist.)
This thing is fringe, to be sure, but not as fringe as you may think; a recent survey found that a majority of self-identified Republicans think that QAnon is fully or partly true, a leap from 46% to 56% since 2019. (72% of Democrats say it is not true at all, which means some Democrats also believe in the theory at least somewhat.) You have almost certainly seen QAnon and QAnon-adjacent memes being share on your social media feeds, even if you didn’t realize it.
The Secret Service, incidentally, has had to ban QAnon swag from Trump rallies.
This has real-world implications on the level of Pizzagate (which led to actual death). And I keep finding myself thinking about the Satanic Panic, which has been widely debunked and disavowed but, until horrendously recently, was still the reason for several wrongly-accused people spending time in jail — for twenty-one years. This, I believe, has the same potential.
So here are some of the articles and podcasts I tweeted out over the weekend. It’s important to be informed, but even more, it’s useful to see how these things grow and morph and where they truly come from, because QAnon isn’t the first and it’s definitely not going to be the last.
ReplyAll, the podcast, recently did an episode on who “Q” may actually be. But more usefully, it provides a window into the oddly banal and silly origins of this whole debacle, which are probably not evident to you unless you spend a lot of time on 4chan or 8chan.
This essay from The Atlantic is a good intro, noting that watching QAnon is like watching a new American religion spring up in front of our very eyes.
The second half of the Rabbit Hole podcast talks to people whose lives and families have been torn apart by QAnon, and to people who believe in it. (The first half is great, too — about how YouTube’s algorithms lead people into increasingly fringe-y political beliefs.)
QAnon is especially picking up speed among self-identified churchgoers and evangelical Christians, and many pastors feel like their hands are tied — something my friend Katelyn reported on for Religion News Service.
My friend Emily also wrote about it for World magazine.
The podcast You’re Wrong About came at it from a different angle, looking at the meme that went around Facebook this summer claiming that the furniture company Wayfair was trafficking kidnapped children. That meme originated in QAnon, and is one of the ways they’ve managed to mainstream themselves this summer, alongside the #SaveTheChildren campaign (which is totally unrelated to the actual legitimate organization Save the Children). The podcast episode also takes a look at some of the problems with the way we try to approach data about child sex trafficking — and it’s striking.
Last week, Lili Loofbourow wrote for Slate about how QAnon took off with women (particularly “influencer” women) this summer, and why.
Sorry to be an inbox downer. But there’s some stuff that’s too important to brush off, and this is definitely part of it. If you have loved ones and relatives who spend time online, especially older or lonely or kind of gullible ones (we all know someone), you should talk to them now about this, because it’s coming for them.