QAnon and the rise of the American Radical: Group's theories range from farcical to diabolical, but refuse to die
House Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is grabbing headlines for her history of pushing QAnon conspiracies -- from showing support on Facebook in recent years for the assassination of ex-President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the false notion that former President Bill Clinton mutilated and killed a young girl -- before becoming a congresswoman, she is by no means the first Republican lawmaker to embrace the network of fringe conspiracies.
Greene is an ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump, who publicly refused to denounce QAnon supporters while he was in office. After he was told what the conspiracy theory was, he said, “they are very much against pedophilia” and added that he agreed with them. "I don't know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate," Trump said in August last year. "I have heard that it's gaining in popularity. I've heard these are people that love our country and they just don't like seeing it." But the Republican Party's dalliance with QAnon is not a recent phenomenon; it has played a part in shaping the GOP over the years.
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What is QAnon?
In a nutshell, the QAnon is believed to have been started by a person who goes by the pseudonym 'Q'. The otherwise anonymous entity is apparently a top-secret official in the US government who posts cryptic online messages about the "truth" of significant events taking place in the nation as well as out in the world.
Washington Post's national technology reporter Craig Timberg, who has covered the conspiracies spouted by QAnon followers, said that it was difficult to pin down exactly what QAnon was. "Our copy editors [at the Post] are questioning whether we should call it a 'conspiracy theory' or an 'extremist ideology', " Timberg told Fresh Air, NPR reported. "Some researchers think it's a cult. Some think it's an alternative reality game."
One of the strongest beliefs propagated by the QAnon network was that Trump was battling a cabal of deep-state actors and other left-wing personalities who were engaged in satanic worship and running a child-trafficking ring. "People who believe in this then take those sort of cryptic messages shared among themselves, analyze it, and then have sort of become a community of fellow travelers in this stuff that seems so crazy to many of us, but actually is a really animating force in a lot of people's lives and has been for years," Timberg added.
GOP's longstanding endorsement of QAnon
Although the House successfully passed a motion to remove Greene from her assigned education and budget committees on February 4, only 11 Republican representatives voted in favor of the motion. As a result, it is clear that even after Trump’s departure from the White House, the Republican Party has been willing to embrace conspiracies and extremism.
Historian Rick Perlstein, who has penned books on the conservative movement’s rise to power, from Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan, has argued that conspiratorial thinking and fringe politics were always much closer to the Republican Party than people think. While the GOP was mostly moderate in the past, conspiracy theorists helped drive the party increasingly to the right. “Those people just got closer and closer to the centers of power,” he said. “It’s one of these things where this has always existed, but got turned up to 11 in the Trump era.”
And Greene wasn't the only QAnon-supporter who ran for Congress last year. According to a report by CNN, nearly two dozen Republicans who had engaged with the QAnon conspiracy appeared on the ballot in November 2020. While some of them engaged with QAnon content online before they sought political office, others have appeared on QAnon-related shows and talked about the conspiracy theories. Some of the names included Josh Barnett from Arizona, Joyce Bentley from Nevada, Lauren Boebert from Colorado, and Mike Cargile from California.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said that Republicans “don’t know what they have on their hands” with the QAnon conspiracy theory and that they are “clearly very torn between embracing it and denouncing it". She noted that Senate Republicans have denounced QAnon while House Republicans “seem to be interested in embracing it". Speaking to Daily Dot, AOC said that the GOP initially thought that they could control the narrative with the conspiracy network and use it to their benefit but they lost that control along the way. “They have shown a track record of thinking they can wink and nod to this but keep it under control but it has increasingly not gotten under control, it’s gotten increasingly out of control," she added.
QAnon sans their 'Messiah'
While QAnon followers have dealt with failed prophecies before, the theorists were shocked to the core after President Joe Biden's inauguration was broadcasted on live television especially after Trump strengthened their belief that the 2020 election had been "stolen" from him and that he was working to make sure that he got a second term at the White House.
As Timberg noted, these theorists view Trump "not merely as their president and leader, but also as essentially a messiah. [They believed that] Trump was going to stay in office, that he had really won the election, that the various baseless claims of election fraud were going to be proven true and acted upon," Timberg says. "And that a bunch of Democrats [were] going to be rounded up and arrested and, depending on which version of this you believed, shot or hung."
Although many of them believed that January 20 would be the day everything would be revealed about the secret group of liberal pedophiles and Trump would announce an array of arrests, the day went forward like any other presidential swearing-in. The ex-POTUS just hopped a plane to Florida. No arrests followed and no announcement of martial law. And certainly no public executions.
Rapid radicalization post-Trump
While Biden's uneventful inauguration did see a number of QAnon followers abandon the cult-like network, there were a certain groups of neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists who called on the disillusioned Q followers to step forward for radicalization. After being shunned by tech giants like Facebook and Twitter, these people took to conservative social media platforms like Telegram, Gab, and Parler to get their voices heard. “Don’t let this moment slip by. Capitalize on their anger. Radicalize!” read one message that circulated among far-right channels on Telegram, FiveThirtyEight reported. “Demoralization will give way to righteous hate, in defense of that which they love,” read another, in a militia chat thread. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” a popular Telegram figure wrote.
Timberg said, "Researchers have been saying to me for weeks that ... the QAnon believers whose beliefs survive the inauguration of President Biden are likely to be more committed. They're likely to be more fervent and more conspiratorial. There is a real danger that what we'll see is a somewhat smaller but maybe more fervent and maybe more hateful and maybe more stealthy remnant that remains a force in our political life for years to come — and maybe also engages in acts of violence."
The anxiety and loss of community have left some QAnon followers more vulnerable to believing radical ideas. And radicalization might not be a difficult task within the conspiracy theory since anti-Semitism was already heavily seeded throughout the Q conspiracy. “Now there’s not really anyone with a different political opinion on these apps, they’re acting as an echo chamber, and general conservatives who weren’t used to this are now being shown certain belief sets,” said Sam Collins, another former Q believer. “It’s quite scary to me.”
Another latest conspiracy theory doing the rounds is that Trump will become president again on March 4 to continue his war against the "deep state". The discourse even features certain documents regarding the 1871 act, attempting to make a case that Trump will be sworn in on March 4. The specific date reportedly comes from the fact that 1933 was also the year when inaugurations were changed from March 4 to January 20 in order to shorten the lame-duck period of outgoing presidents.
"There was some crossover between QAnon and the sovereign citizen movement before," conspiracy theory researcher Travis View told Vice News. "But I've seen sovereign citizen ideas about the United States being a ‘corporation’ become more popular within QAnon and beyond in January. It's concerning because it means QAnon is borrowing ideas from more-established extremism movements."