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Overview
Two experts of extremist radicalization take us down the QAnon rabbit hole, exposing how the conspiracy theory ensnared countless Americans, and show us a way back to sanity.
In January 2021, thousands descended on the U.S. Capitol to aid President Donald Trump in combating a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Two women were among those who died that day. They, like millions of Americans, believed that a mysterious insider known as "Q" is exposing a vast deep-state conspiracy. The QAnon conspiracy theory has ensnared many women, who identify as members of "pastel QAnon," answering the call to "save the children."
With Pastels and Pedophiles, Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko explain why the rise of QAnon should not surprise us: believers have been manipulated to follow the baseless conspiracy. The authors track QAnon's unexpected leap from the darkest corners of the Internet to the filtered glow of yogi-mama Instagram, a frenzy fed by the COVID-19 pandemic that supercharged conspiracy theories and spurred a fresh wave of Q-inspired violence.
Pastels and Pedophiles connects the dots for readers, showing how a conspiracy theory with its roots in centuries-old anti-Semitic hate has adapted to encompass local grievances and has metastasized around the globe—appealing to a wide range of alienated people who feel that something is not quite right in the world around them. While QAnon claims to hate Hollywood, the book demonstrates how much of Q's mythology is ripped from movie and television plot lines.
Finally, Pastels and Pedophiles lays out what can be done about QAnon's corrosive effect on society, to bring Q followers out of the rabbit hole and back into the light.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781503630291 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2021 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 633,326 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
LOONY LIES AND CONSPIRACIES
Making Sense of QAnon
Background and Context
The screen is dark with eerie music playing in the background. The music reaches a crescendo, and a flaming Q appears as a deep voice reveals, “8 million children are missing!” According to the video, the children are being bred specifically for their blood and body parts, they are missing birth certificates so there is no way to trace them, and our (U.S.) government is doing nothing about it—in fact they are participating in the blood lust. The only person on the planet, who can save the children, is Donald John Trump.
Welcome to the universe of QAnon.
QAnon is a baseless conspiracy theory from the darkest underbelly of the Internet. Named after the Department of Energy’s highest level of security clearance, a Q clearance is related to access to nuclear weapons’ designs but not to other national security concerns. The conspiracy theory conceives that former President Trump is fighting a battle against a “deep-state” cabal of Democratic saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex or for their blood.
QAnon burst onto the scene in October 2017 with predictions that the National Guard was about to arrest Hillary Clinton. On October 28, an anonymous user browsing the /pol/ section of 4chan, a notorious alt-right imageboard, saw a post that read, “Hillary Clinton will be arrested between 7:45 AM — 8:30 AM EST on Monday — the morning on Oct 30, 2017.” This user would later adopt the name “Q Clearance Patriot” (shortened to “Q”). Q hinted that they were a military officer in former President Trump’s inner circle; their writings—almost 5,000—gave birth to the QAnon conspiracy theory.
This original Q post was on the 4chan site, which was launched in 2003. There have been several “chans,” including 2chan, 4chan, and 8chan. Historically, the chans, which originated in Asia, were the purview of involuntary celibates (incels), anarchists, and nihilists before spreading to the United States. The 4chan site hosts discussion boards dedicated to different topics, from anime and manga to video games and porn.
As QAnon evolved, it moved from 4chan to other social media platforms, and its messages spread to Facebook, Instagram, Parler, TikTok, and even to Nextdoor and Peloton. In a short four years, QAnon metastasized from a fringe movement on anonymous message boards into a cultlike movement, with millions of followers around the world—one that has captured the imagination and practically seized control of the Republican Party. More surprisingly, it has ensnared many women, causing incalculable damage to families and resulted in murders, kidnappings, and intense partisanship in U.S. politics, as you will read in this book.
There were 97 QAnon-supporting candidates in the 2020 primaries, of which 22 Republicans and 2 Independents were victorious and ran in the November 2020 elections. In 2021 a freshman senator from Georgia was removed from her committee assignments; a second freshman senator from Colorado is being investigated for aiding and abetting a failed coup. And, instead of shunning the baseless conspiracy, the Republican Party appears to have embraced it. Statistics show a steady climb in the percentage of QAnon believers in the United States from 5 percent in 2019 to 10 percent in 2020 to 17 percent in February 2021. An NPR/Ipsos poll revealed 17 percent of Americans believe a group of Satan-worshipping, child-enslaving elites want to control the world. Equally disturbing is that another 37 percent aren’t sure whether the allegations are completely false.
David Gilbert from Vice News explained that:
QAnon followers come from all walks of life—they are liberals, conservatives, PhDs, lawyers, doctors. There are highly educated people that fall into these movements and it is dangerous and remiss to pigeon-hole QAnon followers ac- cording to educational attainment or social status.
Marc-André Argentino, a PhD candidate from Montreal who studies the conspiracy, criticized the Democratic National Committee when they launched a $500,000 ad campaign in February 2021 that offered the GOP a choice between being “the party of QAnon or appealing to college educated voters.” Argentino insisted that QAnon comprises people of all educational levels, and he railed on Twitter: “Can we stop saying these are uneducated people, that they are crazy and wear tinfoil hats?”
The increasing number of people who believe in QAnon and the range of socioeconomic and educational strata to which it appeals mean that it is highly likely someone in your family or among your friends believes that QAnon is real.
What is QAnon? Why do ordinarily sane people believe something so outrageous? How did we get here? And can we fix the problem?
This book seeks to answer all of these questions. We examine the possible identity of Q, trace the origins of QAnon to long- entrenched anti-Semitic tropes, explore why women have been especially vulnerable to QAnon, and explain psychologically how Q has managed to take root in the U.S. body politic.
What Is QAnon?
By now, you have probably seen and heard about QAnon: a baseless conspiracy theory that claims there is a secret cabal of devil-worshipping Democrats and elites that feed off the blood of children. Like its predecessor Pizzagate (discussed in Chapter 2), which was another social media rumor alleging that Hillary Clinton was operating a child-trafficking scheme from Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, QAnon began on the chans in a series of forum posts. Its origins are hotly debated: Did it start as a puzzle, or a joke, or even as the basis for a live-action role-playing (LARP) game? The nature of QAnon and the complexity of the posts changed as it moved through different areas of the Inter- net before ending up on the Facebook feed of your family and coworkers. The core conspiracy claim of QAnon is that there is a “deep state,” and the only person who is capable of fighting it and preventing a dystopian future (like the one depicted in film The Purge) is Donald Trump.
Who Is Q?
No one really knows definitively who Q is. Theories vary widely, according to Vice News and HBO documentaries tracking down the identity of Q. Some say that it is Edward Snowden, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, or even Alex Jones. The HBO documentary Q: Into the Storm settled on Ron Watkins, the son of Jim Watkins—known by his computer alias “CodeMonkeyZ.”
Q began posting in October 2017, feigning that they were a high-level intelligence operative with a Q-level security clearance. Based on months of research by Vice News, there appeared to be several possibilities for Q’s identity, four of which we present below.
As researchers have sought to identify who Q is and debate the likely identities, it is equally plausible that whoever was posting as Q might have changed a few times—a literary ruse used in shows like Gossip Girl or Bridgerton. Terrorism expert Clint Watts has likened Q to the fictional character “Dread Pirate Roberts” in the film The Princess Bride. In the film there is no ONE pirate named Roberts, but the name is passed down every few years to someone else. Westley explains this baton passing to Buttercup:
Roberts had grown so rich, he wanted to retire . . . he told me his secret. “I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts, . . . my name is Ryan; I inherited the ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts. . . . He was not the real Dread Pirate Roberts either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired fifteen years and living like a king in Patagonia.” It was the name that mattered.
It is also possible that the original Q began posting for the LOLs or “lolz”—as they call “shit posting”—by adding vague Nostradamus-like predictions. This is what most people without much experience with 4chan might have misunderstood: that much of the content was meant to be sarcastic or not serious. At the outset it was not clear whether Q was real or a fictional game. But its gamelike characteristics were precisely what appealed to the 4chan audience and kept them engaged. Vice News investigated and observed:
Part of the QAnon appeal lies in its game-like quality. Followers wait for clues left by “Q” on a message board. When the clues appear, believers dissect the riddle-like posts along- side Trump’s speeches and tweets and news articles in an effort to validate the main narrative that Trump is winning a war against evil.
So let’s begin with the first person claiming to be Q.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 Loony Lies and Conspiracies: Making Sense of QAnon 1
2 January 6, 2021: Capitol Hill, the Failed Insurrection 38
3 Red-Pilling, Right-Wing Conspiracies, and Radicalization 79
4 Life After Q 113
5 Qontagion 149
6 FaQs 175
Notes 197
Index 235
