QAnon

The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family

by Jesselyn Cook  · 22 Jul 2024  · 321pp  · 95,778 words

House LLC. State illustrations © Denys Holovatiuk_stock.adobe.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cook, Jesselyn, 1993– author. Title: The quiet damage : QAnon and the destruction of the American family / by Jesselyn Cook. Description: First edition. | New York : Crown, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2023047191 (print) | LCCN

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2023047192 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593443255 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593443262 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: QAnon conspiracy theory—United States. | Internet—Social aspects—United States. | Internet—United States—Psychological aspects. | Internet—Political aspects—United States. | Radicalization—Technological innovations—United States. Classification

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and out of public view. Dinner tables become battlegrounds, holiday visits become dreaded obligations, loved ones become strangers, and cherished relationships become painful memories. Under QAnon’s expansive umbrella are two camps of people; combined, they double the population of California. In the first are the true believers, who think Donald

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of Georgia’s Fourteenth Congressional District; several have proven violent, even murderous.) And in the second, much larger camp, which emerged over the pandemic as QAnon ideology blended insidiously into mainstream discourse, are those who embrace some or all of the core conspiracy theories but don’t identify with the movement

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, and Emily is no anomaly: There are plenty of intelligent, seemingly normal individuals who have come to see the world through this lens. Broadly speaking, QAnon is now a collective of Baby Boomers, young people, ruralites, urbanites, white supremacists, people of color, right-wing extremists—even progressives. For many, the

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. Mass shootings became false flags, celebrity deaths turned into secret assassinations, Trump’s Twitter tantrums were actually brilliant political chess moves—in the world of QAnon, nothing was what it seemed. Some decoders showed their faces, while others, like Joe M, kept their identities hidden. Matt followed them all, taking

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Twitter. “Friends, if you were looking for undeniable truth who is behind [Blasey Ford’s] false allegations, take a hard look at this picture,” the QAnon account @Trump45awesome urged in a post retweeted thousands of times. “This will make your blood boil.” People outside the movement began amplifying the photo as

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, in which an individual experienced delusions but otherwise continued to function normally. In a similar vein, Leah found, others online speculated more generally that some QAnon followers could have a syndrome called “folie à deux” (madness of two) or, in wider contexts, “folie à plusieurs” (madness of several). It involved

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insane. It was a temptingly simple explanation for a deeply complex phenomenon. Media coverage was partly responsible for this unevidenced perception: It tended to spotlight QAnon’s most gobsmacking beliefs, leaving people mystified as to how any sane individual could fall for something so crazy. But that obscured the process. Believers

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weren’t drawn to QAnon through lurid tales of cannibalism, infanticide, or satanic sex abuse rituals. They started out consuming lighter, more digestible conspiracy theory hors d’oeuvres with kernels

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their sites and beyond while raking in the ad dollars. Creators were falling over themselves watching their most unhinged videos erupt with monetizable traffic, turning QAnon decoding into a cottage industry of its own. And caught in the middle of it all, searching for truth, were people like Doris. * * * — Doris

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the culture wars. This perfect storm of chaos did two things: It made everyday people like Alice more vulnerable—and it made disinformation peddlers like QAnon more powerful. In times of unrest and uncertainty throughout history, people have turned to conspiracy theories—some valid, many not—to make sense of what

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He did. Fauci and his wife and daughters were so inundated with death threats that they required a round-the-clock security detail. * * * — Inside the QAnon labyrinth, opposition was celebrated as validation. So the less Alice trusted the press, the more she trusted the people it debunked and criticized. If the

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wellness groups, where fears about child trafficking, grooming, 5G, and vaccines resonated deeply. The damage was done: Mommy bloggers and healthy-living influencers started becoming QAnon evangelists themselves, bringing the falsehoods back to their trusting, parasocially attached audiences. Compelled in many cases by a sense of maternal duty, women—in particular

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American singer and mother, in her crusade against gay schoolteachers, whom she believed to be potential child molesters. The timing couldn’t have been better: QAnon’s messaging hit home inside quarantined households nationwide as the already-disproportionate burden of caregiving on women dramatically increased. It also promised community, purpose, and

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Yorkie named Peanut, declared to her one hundred thousand Instagram followers. She had pivoted from posting brand-sponsored health and beauty product endorsements to selling QAnon merchandise, including baby-blue water bottles displaying the text “WWG1WGA” and “Save Our Children.” After labeling herself an expert on government operations, “frequencies and energies

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outliers Tayshia presumed them to be. Black Americans, as well as Hispanics, were in fact statistically more likely than their white counterparts to believe in QAnon’s central claims. And despite its roots in white supremacist lore and antisemitic myths, they were overrepresented in the movement relative to their makeup of

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to hurt them; chronic social devaluation had been found to make them more apprehensive in general. As made clear by her sister’s interest in QAnon falsehoods, Tayshia’s perception of the movement as a magnet for white supremacists was an oversimplification. Hateful conspiracy theories could, in effect, both attract

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staggering volumes that state representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell would soon call on the FBI to investigate the eruption of “far-right conspiracy theories relating to ‘QAnon’ or other fringe ideologies designed to manipulate Latino voters.” Trump would even launch a Spanish YouTube ad in the crucial swing state making the explosive

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against the Deep State” from Austin, Texas. Another said that serving as an anon had given his life meaning. That was perhaps the greatest gift QAnon could offer its adherents. Man’s desire for meaning was intrinsic and intoxicating; famed psychiatrist Viktor Frankl had called it the primary motivation of human

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. It’s also a bedrock of conspiracy theory thinking, wherein illusory patterns perceived in random noise are held up as evidence of nefarious activity. In QAnon, apophenia was the name of the game. Conclusions were laid out unsupported; anons were then tasked with hunting down proof via independent “research,” instilling

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couch in gym shorts as weeks blended together and virus death tolls skyrocketed, Adam devoured news articles written by extremism reporters who’d been studying QAnon from its early stages, his blue eyes scanning longingly for useful information to share with his sisters. He, Leah, and Jessica had been texting

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, who spouted increasingly shocking and petrifying nonsense from atop his now multi-million-dollar empire. Like more and more right-wing influencers, he was regurgitating QAnon narratives to his millions of followers without outwardly associating with the movement. Comparing Covid protocols to Nazi rule, and vaccine opponents to the Founding Fathers

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the global financial crisis of 2008, traversing a complex social media landscape with limited digital literacy skills only greased the wheels. But what all elderly QAnon believers shared, by virtue of their age, was a natural vulnerability to a diminishing sense of “mattering” as their social roles changed. Retirement, for

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A mission to save the children, drive out satanism, and restore traditional values to society. A path to self-actualization. As he leaned deeper into QAnon dogma, decoders became clergy interpreting the teachings of their deities, Q and Trump. Q Drops, often steeped in scripture, became sacred texts bearing hidden truths

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service of common psychological needs (certainty, purpose, community) and shared underlying elements (grand narratives, a righteous mission, conviction in the unseen). And while believers of QAnon theories represented only a small minority of Christians overall, they accounted for nearly one in four white Evangelicals; the majority, also, were supporters of Christian

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against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (EPHESIANS 6:11–12) * * * — QAnon showed Matt the way. Being a digital soldier was his chance to fulfill his duty. It came with a heuristic sense of immediacy and excitement

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clues about the coming Great Awakening were trickling out every day via Trump tweets or Q Drops, filtered through savvy decoders for anons to investigate. QAnon celebrity Dave Hayes, or “Praying Medic,” the self-proclaimed faith healer and “mailman” delivering messages from God to Q, even suggested that the president

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more concerned about his own political prospects than human lives. Matt also saw online that multiple anti–child trafficking organizations had put out statements denouncing QAnon, warning that its viral “conspiracy theories” had caused their tip lines to be flooded with nonsense, detracting from their ability to help kids in

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red rocks and flowering cacti jostling in the hot, dry breeze, occasionally crossing paths with little garter snakes or horned lizards basking in the sunshine, QAnon influencers would hyperventilate in her ear about the ghastly depravity that Trump was battling behind closed doors in his quest to save humanity. Sometimes she

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the concerns behind her doomsday conspiracy theories, he was coming to understand why she believed them, and his frustration with her was melting into sympathy. QAnon was poisoning her already-frightened mind with crackpot paranoia and then dangling silver-platter solutions before her eyes. Watching her light up as she spoke

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Emily was surrounded by nothing but farmland with little to no remaining real-world interaction. And after watching her cover her professional Facebook page in QAnon content about child sacrifice, he doubted that she even had many legal clients left. Now she was locking herself inside her conspiracy theory echo chamber

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Washington. Safford was tapped by chapters of the National Association of Social Workers to develop a training program for practitioners to use when working with QAnon believers or their family members. The strategies he recommends align closely with the approach that Christopher and Ted used with Alice: a combination of the

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–22, https://doi.org/​10.1177/​1533317518772060. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Media coverage was partly responsible: S. Gorman and J. M. Gorman, “Do QAnon Followers Have High Rates of Mental Illness?,” Psychology Today, Denying to the Grave (blog), May 4, 2021, https://www.psychologytoday.com/​us/​blog/​denying-the

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-grave/​202105/​do-qanon-followers-have-high-rates-mental-illness. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT conspiracy theory belief and depression: J. Green et al., “Depressive Symptoms and Conspiracy

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tv-archives/​dave-hayes-praying-medic/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT like “being in the special forces”: K. Mantyla, “Dave Hayes Says Being a QAnon Conspiracy Theorist Is ‘Like Being in the Special Forces,’ ” Right Wing Watch, September 17, 2021, https://www.rightwingwatch.org/​post/​dave-hayes-says-being-a

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/​docs/​publications/​women/​b0284_dolwb_1962.pdf. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT One in every five Americans who agreed: PRRI staff, “The Persistence of QAnon in the Post-Trump Era: An Analysis of Who Believes the Conspiracies,” Public Religion Research Institute, February 24, 2022, https://www.prri.org/​research/​the

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-persistence-of-qanon-in-the-post-trump-era-an-analysis-of-who-believes-the-conspiracies/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT diminishing sense of “mattering”: M. Stanley, “The

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://doi.org/​10.1111/​pops.12822. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT one in four white Evangelicals: Public Religion Research Institute staff, “The Persistence of QAnon in the Post-Trump Era: An Analysis of Who Believes the Conspiracies,” Public Religion Research Institute, February 24, 2022, https://www.prri.org/​research/​the

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-persistence-of-qanon-in-the-post-trump-era-an-analysis-of-who-believes-the-conspiracies/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT supporters of Christian nationalism: Public Religion Research

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condo in Miami: E. Palmer, “DeAnna Lorraine Thinks Miami Condo Collapse Was ‘Deep State Operation,’ ” Newsweek, June 30, 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/​deanna-lorraine-qanon-florida-condo-collapse-john-mcafee-conspiracy-1605519. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a wave of calls to poison control centers: J. N. Lind et

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://www.huffpost.com/​entry/​anti-vaccine-conspiracy-theories-divorce_n_60faf8b6e4b05ff8cfc8086b. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT CHAPTER 15 New York Times article: G. Russonello, “QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests,” New York Times, May 27, 2021, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com

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-the-end-times-because-trump-is-creating-a-utopia/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Trump alone had amplified: A. Kaplan, “Trump Has Repeatedly Amplified QAnon Twitter Accounts. The FBI Has Linked the Conspiracy Theory to Domestic Terror,” Media Matters for America, August 1, 2019, https://www.mediamatters.org/​twitter/​fbi

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Award from Columbia Journalism School and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation honoring “the best in American nonfiction writing.” For her reporting on the destructive toll of QAnon and other conspiracy theories on American families, she has been featured on programs such as CNN’s The Whole Story documentary series and Anderson Cooper

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World

by James Ball  · 19 Jul 2023  · 317pp  · 87,048 words

on 4chan’s anonymous bulletin boards and its initial devotion to the posts of Q, the movement came to be known by a catchy portmanteau: QAnon. The QAnon conspiracy is a hard one to fully define – we will be doing that throughout the book. But at its core is the concept that

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the insurrectionists didn’t come into contact with representatives or senators. It also, according to conventional wisdom, marked the high (or low) moment of QAnon. Following the riot, those physically present were arrested, while sluggish social networks finally banned its users from their online services. Couple this with yet another

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developed public health, vaccination, antibiotics and more to tackle real-world pandemics, we need to develop a toolkit to tackle the online equivalents – because while QAnon is the first digital pandemic, it won’t be the last. Digital viral reservoirs Rabies. Smallpox. Ebola. Bird flu. Leprosy. Tuberculosis. Zika. Lassa fever.

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’s online far-right supporters. Norms, narratives, tactics, even a shared language emerge from one movement to another, changing what will come next. Already QAnon has started to evolve beyond Trump, taking on the broader anti-paedophile narrative and capitalising on the backlash to anti-pandemic measures. Its private organising

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in chan culture. Coverage at the time largely centred on Davison’s public identification with the incel movement. But Davison’s online posts also reflected QAnon-like sentiments, stating his belief that ‘there are many paedophiles and even reported devil worshippers.’ He had posted disturbing, misogynistic videos to YouTube, which

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looks like an incredibly unlikely coalition, bringing together extremely online teenagers, old school far-righters and also suburban mums and their health and wellness gurus. QAnon managed the kind of coalition-building that most politicians can only dream of – but crucially, absolutely none of it was led by, orchestrated by

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quickly.’ Wildon, working alongside his colleague Marc-André Argentino, wanted to create a number that was a conservative estimate of the lowest bound of QAnon accounts in Telegram groups. They started by culling down a list of possible groups to only include those which were definitely primarily or predominantly focused

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to overturn its result. Clarence Thomas declined to recuse himself from cases relating to the 2020 election, despite his wife’s activities.36 Supporters of QAnon – especially those in America – could see visible public figures, whether celebrities, generals or politicians, all appearing to endorse one of the most sweeping and

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as highlighting interests in ‘politics, parenting and Christianity’. Within two days, Facebook’s algorithm was suggesting ‘Carol’ join multiple Facebook groups connected to the QAnon conspiracy. Even though the account did not join those groups, content from them kept being pushed its way. The Wall Street Journal concluded: ‘Within one

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a ‘stolen’ election – and then in turn appears to have helped radicalise his key advisors and in turn the president himself. Through December, key QAnon influencers quickly started endorsing ‘military’ options to prevent Trump losing power, and then started considering civil war and direct action.55 A deadly feedback loop

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fallen silent a month before) suggested something big would happen on inauguration day. That day came and went without incident, leading many journalists to suggest QAnon would now wither away. It did not. Marjorie Taylor Greene filed impeachment documents against President Joe Biden on 21 January – less than twenty-four

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Rojas was hardly a controlling mastermind: several people spontaneously organised their own rallies and protests connected to #SaveTheChildren, having seen the movement begin. As ever, QAnon is not a movement that needs or wants leaders. The eventual count of August 2020 #SaveTheChildren rallies was around 250 cities – mostly in the US

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them. Another child protection foundation based in Florida, the KidSafe Foundation, went even further than Polaris: ‘The conspiracy theory and cult movement known as QAnon is attempting to hijack the good names of organisations leading the fight against child abuse and sex trafficking. We cannot let this happen.’ The statement

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went on: ‘QAnon promoters are parasites. To grow their footprint, gain credibility and spread misinformation, they associate their message of hate and bigotry with well-known, well-

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a bizarre Fox News appearance the evening of the article’s publication claiming the allegations were part of an elaborate multi-million dollar extortion scheme. QAnon – usually sceptical of anything that suggests people aren’t involved in sex trafficking – immediately accepted this version of events. Such behaviour defies easy explanation,

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’s algorithms keep recommending content to you endlessly. Research has shown that both sites’ recommendation features could easily lead users from relatively mainstream content down QAnon-linked rabbit holes.9 Every long-term conspiracy theorist spotted the opportunity of a lifetime. David Icke – of ‘alien reptiles are secretly running the

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of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci. Despite Fauci having served in his role under presidents from both parties after being first appointed under Reagan, QAnon rapidly took against him, and their ‘research’ rapidly gave results. Fauci, they discovered, had connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – or so they

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but the overlap is now corroborated by hard research. Internal research conducted by Facebook found that there was a significant overlap between accounts interested in QAnon and the accounts most actively pushing anti-vaxx and similar Covid-19 messaging.44 This corroborated earlier research by the Stanford Internet Observatory, which found

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cross-political combinations were just as visible in the US conspiratorial anti-vaccine movements, with perhaps even stranger outcomes in their rallies. The wellness-to-QAnon pipeline remained alive and well, with crystal-healing hippie-ish groups expanding their already existing mistrust of mainstream medicine. The health and wellness New

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about gatherings of billionaires like Davos or Bilderberg, and more. It could bring conspiracies and their leaders and influencers together, and mobilise their followers. One QAnon’s strangest subcultures is the one that focuses on the Kennedys – because, after all, what respectable online conspiracy would miss an opportunity to involve

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his fabulous billionaire lifestyle to become president he would be an unstoppable force for ultimate justice that Democrats and Republicans alike would celebrate.’9 Some QAnon followers decided that a Trump supporter from Pennsylvania was a surgically disguised JFK Jr who was keeping his cover. Others decided he would resurface

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having made absolutely zero mention of Ukraine’s (fictional) biological weapons labs before its invasion, started to cite this retroactively as their reason for invasion. QAnon was now influencing geopolitics as well as multiple countries’ internal affairs, at least to the extent of giving Russia’s extraordinarily malleable information operations a

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and others. Retired baseball player Aubrey Huff (whose account was later deleted for violating Twitter’s rules)22 posted following the election defeat that ‘QAnon was a democratic strategy to keep many conservatives complacent in “trusting the plan” while the left continued their evil corruption.’23 Far-right commentator Raheem

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Peter Knight, an American Studies professor at the University of Manchester and conspiracy theory researcher, believes people following and trying to tackle the harm of QAnon and other emergent online movements should have looked to this historical research sooner to guide them in what would happen. ‘Sociologists have long known that

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of the movement. For others, the pandemic and the accompanying restrictions, plus the international spread of #SaveTheChildren, gave people a new focus to their QAnon proselytising, again mirroring what sociologists would expect. Not letting a total lack of knowledge of the politics of some of the countries concerned get in

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offline one. If we’re going to take this different approach seriously, though, it raises some difficult questions for us. There are elements within QAnon and its affiliated groupings that are deeply racist, antisemitic, misogynistic and homophobic. We never want to find ourselves making excuses for such views or behaviours

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world ‘ritual’ to his comment, spurring new theories and new curiosity. As the Republican party – now for its primaries, especially, beholden entirely to its QAnon-infested base – moved towards the 2022 midterms, and in turn the 2024 election, it was no coincidence that suddenly elected representatives talked at almost every

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the Capitol’, www.wsj.com, 12 January 2021. 6. More background on these protests here: Ewan Palmer, ‘Global March 20 Anti-Vaccine Protests Promoted by QAnon-Linked Groups’, www.newsweek.com, 16 March 2021, and in this thread: https://twitter.com/VeraMBergen/status/1419079819959029763 7. Joe Ondrak and Jordan Wildon, ‘

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was’, https://techcrunch.com, 27 January 2017. 41. There’s a good history of some of these accounts in this Bellingcat account: ‘The Making of Qanon: A Crowdsourced Conspiracy’, www.bellingcat.com, 7 January 2021. 42. Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security, ‘Departmental Personnel Security FAQs’, https://www.energy

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Be All About Protecting Kids. Its Primary Enabler Appears to Have Hosted Child Porn Domains’, www.motherjones.com, 29 October 2020. 31. ‘Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints’, www.nytimes.com, 19 February 2022. 32. Nick Perry, ‘Report finds lapses ahead of New Zealand mosque attack’, https://apnews

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criticism, there are suggestions of pressure behind the scenes: Amanda Meade, ‘ABC denies it “pulled” Four Corners program on Scott Morrison and a supporter of QAnon’, www.theguardian.com, 3 June 2021. 21. Eric Hananoki, ‘Marjorie Taylor Greene penned conspiracy theory that a laser beam from space started deadly 2018

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Marjorie Taylor Greene: The Obama administration used MS-13 to assassinate Seth Rich’, www.mediamatters.org, 13 August 2020. 23. Alex Kaplan, ‘Here are the QAnon supporters running for Congress in 2020’, www.mediamatters.org, 7 January 2020. 24. Ibid. 25. At https://twitter.com/daithaigilbert/status/1506272895978323973. 26. Barbara

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’, www.insider.com, 1 May 2020. 18. Jane Coaston, ‘YouTube’s conspiracy theory crisis, explained’, www.vox.com, 14 December 2018. 19. Will Sommer, ‘QAnon Mom Arrested For Murder of Fringe Legal Theorist’, www.thedailybeast.com, 27 January 2021. 20. Adam Tamburin, ‘Debunked conspiracy theories quickly took root amid uncertainty

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.com, 30 December 2020. 21. ‘Behind the Nashville Bombing, a Conspiracy Theorist Stewing About the Government’, www.nytimes.com, 24 February 2021. 22. START, ‘QAnon Offenders in the United States’, www.start.umd.edu, May 2021. 23. Grahame Allen, Matthew Burton and Alison Pratt, ‘Terrorism in Great Britain: The Statistics

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’, https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk, 19 July 2022. 24. Michael Jensen and Sheehan Kane, ‘QAnon-inspired violence in the United States: an empirical assessment of a misunderstood threat’, www.tandfonline.com, 14 December 2021. 25. Nick Perry, ‘Report finds lapses

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risked their jobs to reveal the truth about Jimmy Savile’, www.theguardian.com, 2 November 2021. 4. Gino Spocchia, ‘Lauren Boebert accused of parroting QAnon conspiracy with tweet about missing children’, www.independent.co.uk, 14 December 2021. 5. ‘Fact Check-Tweet overstates number of children who went missing in

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Conspiracy Theories, and Accelerationism’, Perspectives on Terrorism, 15/2 (2021), at www.jstor.org. 47. Louise Hall, ‘ “Forcing boys to wear masks is emasculating”: GOP QAnon candidate defies CDC guidance on face coverings’, www.independent.co.uk, 9 September 2020. 48. Timothy Caulfield, ‘Covid vaccine and mask conspiracies succeed when they

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com/Shayan86/status/1460633229862608916. 15. ‘Cognitive dissonance: What to know’, www.medicalnewstoday.com, accessed 17 October 2022. 16. David Gilbert, ‘Roger Stone Visited the JFK-QAnon Cult In Dallas’, www.vice.com, 14 December 2021. 17. World Economic Forum, ‘Our Mission’, www.weforum.org, accessed 17 October 2022. 18. World

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s section 28’, https://theconversation.com, 16 February 2022. 47. At https://twitter.com/AriDrennen/status/1508976786356334593. 48. David Gilbert, ‘The Right Has Gone Full QAnon on Disney’, www.vice.com, 1 April 2022. 49. Joe Gould, ‘After Trump impeachment, US lawmakers stress unity on Ukraine military aid’, www.defensenews.

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://twitter.com/shayan86/status/1345092143413649409?s=21. 12. At https://twitter.com/travis_view/status/1325807371872989184/photo/2. 13. Ibid. 14. Nathan J. Robinson, ‘QAnon and the Fragility of Truth’, www.currentaffairs.org, 30 December 2020. 15. Hunter Walker, ‘NBA player turned conspiracy theorist stages one-man pro-Trump protest

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-wages-rise-above-pre-financial-crisis-levels 33. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/donald-trump-august-reinstatement 34. https://www.newsweek.com/qanon-theorists-switch-date-march-20-after-no-trump-inauguration-call-4th-false-flag-1573871 35. https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-trump-reinstated-idUSL1N2OV1W3 36

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. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/republicans-trump-reinstated-president-yougov-b1957930.html 38. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-qanon-military-theories-idUSKBN29R1ZA 39. At https://twitter.com/kaleighrogers/status/1372269726995509251?s=21. 40. At https://twitter.com/KaleighRogers/status/1372280139539701760/photo/1. 41.

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here, here, here Covid-19: The Great Reset, here, here lockdowns, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and rise of QAnon, here, here see also anti-vaccination movement CrossFit, here Cruise, Tom, here ‘crumbs’, here Current Affairs, here Damsel in Distress, here Dartmouth College, here Darwin

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here, here, here, here, here, here rape ‘jokes’, here rape threats, here, here Reagan, Ronald, here ReAwaken America, here Reddit, here, here, here, here, here QAnon relatives group, here ‘redpilling’, here, here #ReleaseTheKraken, here Republican National Committee, here Republicans, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

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Hill riot, here and child abuse conspiracy, here, here and continuing conspiracy theories, here, here, here, here, here and Covid-19 pandemic, here, here and QAnon influence, here, here and Ukraine invasion, here ‘Trump Patriots Group’, here Truss, Liz, here Turnbull, Malcolm, here, here Twisted Sister, here Twitter, here, here,

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

by Kelly Weill  · 22 Feb 2022

as more real, more authentic.” Conspiracy theorists frequently accuse the media of plotting to withhold truths and keep the public in the dark. Believers in QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory that falsely accuses former president Donald Trump’s rivals of satanic pedophilia and cannibalism, sometimes claim that journalists rise at

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four in the morning to receive orders from the government. QAnon is extreme, but a broad swath of Americans echo its mistrust in the media. Sixty-one percent of respondents to a December 2018 Pew poll

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September 2018, he had more than four hundred thousand views of his videos, which spanned conspiratorial topics from Flat Earth to government mind control to QAnon. “YouTube Is Censoring This Video Sound Analysis,” he titled a video about an organ-theft conspiracy theory, posted not long before his Twitter rant.

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recommendations actively cross-pollinated the conspiracy world, luring truthers over the lines that once demarcated their individual theories. The result was a conspiratorial melting pot: QAnon followers preaching their gospel on pages for people who believed airplanes were spraying mind-control drugs, bogus miracle cures being sold in anti-vaccination groups

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at a White House press conference. Beth also joined some of the better-known conspiracy groups on Facebook: the big pages for Flat Earth and QAnon and, for the sake of character development, some politically neutral groups for people who like hunting for bargain furniture. Then I let Facebook recommend pages

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’s targeted advertising profile, I learned that Facebook had labeled the account’s political leanings as “very conservative,” with an interest in “Earth,” “Planet,” a QAnon slogan, and “Potato.”) Other reporters have run similar experiments. In 2017, BuzzFeed News’s Ryan Broderick made a new, blank Facebook account and hit “Like

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protective face mask only increased the risk of contracting the illness. Some of the film’s initial success stemmed from early efforts by a prominent QAnon supporter who collaborated with Mikovits to set up a Twitter account and an online fundraiser ahead of the movie’s release, generating buzz and networking

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Facebook. And because of Facebook’s algorithmic rabbit hole, COVID-19 misinformation sucked some Plandemic viewers into more extreme beliefs. Ann-Marie, a newly converted QAnon follower, told me she’d only learned about the far-right theory after binge-watching online videos about COVID-19 hoaxes. “If it wasn’t

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Marie told me of her tentative pre-COVID ventures on the conspiracy internet. Without the virus, she said she “wouldn’t have found out about QAnon.” One COVID-19 hoax popular in Flat Earth Facebook circles wrongly claimed that truthers could exempt themselves from wearing protective face masks if they lied

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’s prophet could separate the conspiratorial cousins.) With its baffling insistence that Hillary Clinton has literally eaten children and its lust for mass executions, the QAnon theory can understandably put some believers at odds with family members, who are often bewildered or upset by their loved ones’ convictions. “She’s isolated

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herself,” the son of one QAnon believer told the HuffPost. He’d cut ties with his mother after shouting matches over her beliefs, among which was her insistence that Clinton had

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me in festivities this year bc their minds are not open to the truth, but I am Thankful for PRESIDENT TRUMP and the WW1WGA [a QAnon slogan] family!! If anyone else is spending today by themselvs I would be happy to exchange photos of our meals.” Other believers commiserated in the

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Obama of being transgender (which she is not). An entire rabbit hole of YouTube videos accuses transgender people of being part of an Illuminati plot. QAnon supporters wrongly link the transgender rights movement with the sexualization of children, whom they believe are being abused and/or eaten by Democrats. At the

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on the other side. Serena, a Florida woman, doesn’t share her last name, and for good reason: she was among the first crowd of QAnon followers in November 2017. “From the beginning,” she told me. “I was all in and so full of hope.” That changed when Q started posting

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to preach against the movement’s prophet, she found herself facing torrents of threats and abuse. Undeterred, but now semianonymous, Serena joined #DenounceQ, an anti-QAnon movement composed of former believers and people trying to pry their loved ones from the conspiratorial clique. One man in her group lost both his

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parents to the conspiracy theory, she told me. “He’s been trying to tell [QAnon followers] what we know: that Q’s just a franchise for profit and entertainment, and it has estranged him from his mom and dad.” Leaving

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the QAnon community was a harsh break, one that left Serena so disenchanted with conservatives that she cut ties with the Republican party and got “out of

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politics” entirely. She also started reading about cults, and recognized too many uncomfortable similarities to the QAnon circles she used to frequent. Cultists and the QAnon community both “isolate their followers and turn their followers against all other sources,” she told me. “They also create apathy by

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ve created a complete circle: no matter where you go, they have an answer. But all the answers are nonsensical.” Close-knit conspiracy circles like QAnon and Flat Earth can absolutely “fall under the rubric of cult definition,” said Rachel Bernstein, the psychologist who focuses on cult exit. She typically helps

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ranks of conspiracy theorists committing real-world harm in an effort to prove their beliefs. Chief among this dangerous crowd are adherents of QAnon and Pizzagate (a sort of QAnon predecessor that specifically accuses Trump’s foes of participating in child sex trafficking under Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, DC, pizzeria and

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Times. A judge called it “sheer luck” he didn’t hurt anyone. Unchastened and unchecked, Pizzagate carried on, eventually transferring much of its momentum to QAnon, which borrows many of its foundational claims. In January 2019, twenty-two-year-old Ryan Jaselskis doused a curtain in Comet Ping Pong with lighter

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fire while customers—some of them children—were eating dinner. An hour before the arson, according to NBC News, Jaselskis uploaded a YouTube video about QAnon. Though he managed to escape Comet Ping Pong undetected, his act of arson was captured on the now-wary restaurant’s security footage, which managers

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later, police arrested him for climbing a fence at the Washington Monument, and identified him as the guy who’d torched a pizzeria across town. QAnon has a sizable and growing membership overlap with Flat Earth—and both conspiracy theories have a body count. When I asked Flat Earthers at a

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2018 conference whether they believed in QAnon, about a year after the theory’s emergence, most told me they’d never heard of it or that they were skeptical. By the

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2019 conference, however, QAnon had hit the mainstream, with Q supporters running for Congress and scoring retweets from Trump on Twitter. Some diehards treated the theory as a near

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Q’s posts and citing them by number, as if they were scripture, or printing them out in book form like a religious text. With QAnon’s sudden surge in popularity, I didn’t have to go looking for its backers at the November 2019 Flat Earth International Conference: two approached

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told me, based on her conversations with Flat Earthers at the conference. She was trying to actively spread Q awareness off-line by distributing cheap QAnon bracelets anywhere people might be receptive to the theory: at Trump rallies, gun shows, and, now, at a Flat Earth conference. Flat Earth’s

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new embrace of QAnon worried me. Even if my free-jewelry friend had overestimated her figures, I’d watched Q-flavored memes make their way into Flat Earth Facebook

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groups over the previous year. And in 2019 alone, QAnon had been implicated in a number of violent incidents and at least two deaths. In January 2019, Buckey Wolfe drove a four-foot sword through

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supremacists, and from conspiracy theorists who claimed the government was actively following and harassing them for no discernible reason. Eventually, he landed on videos about QAnon and a sometimes-overlapping theory that claims some people are actually lizards or reptilians in disguise. The fictions of his internet world hacked away at

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his real life until they destroyed it, taking his brother with him. While Wolfe was awaiting trial in May 2019, a hero of the QAnon world was found dead. Isaac Kappy, a small-time actor with a role in Thor, had rediscovered fame in August 2018 when he gave an

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one of Hanks’s month-old tweets about roadkill, which they said was a coded threat toward Kappy. “Posted 42 days before his death,” one QAnon follower commented under Hanks’s tweet. “And he died at age 42.” At least one would-be deadly plot involved a Flat Earther who also

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believed in QAnon. Kurt Cofano, a Pennsylvania man, spent the spring of 2020 uploading videos about both conspiracy theories to his YouTube channel, where he used a Flat

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drive to DC to blow up the headquarters of some of the government agencies he’d vilified in his video compilations about Flat Earth and QAnon. He was allegedly en route on his destructive road trip when cops pulled him over, likely tipped off by a social media post in

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of the Auschwitz death camp. That a white nationalist YouTuber, visibly drunk, made a video trying to guess how many Jewish grandparents I have. That QAnon believers have added me to a public list of supposed Jews they suspect of crimes (a list that includes several of my gentile journalist peers

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synagogues across the United States. The trend shows no signs of abating. In August 2020, a scheduled Republican National Convention speaker recommended a series of QAnon-associated tweets that also promoted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not a fabrication,” read one

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it seems and that a murderable minority is to blame. Over the course of the Trump presidency, the far right mobilized around conspiracy theories about QAnon, voter fraud, and immigration. Just as fear and insecurity turned many people toward conspiratorial belief in the first place, the far right’s political

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in popularity during the Trump presidency, I’d seen the Flat Earth movement grow increasingly entangled with political conspiracy movements like Pizzagate and its successor, QAnon. The Flat Earth Facebook groups I monitored had become awash not just in globe skeptics, but in ones who now accused Hillary Clinton of removing

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wingnuts like Greene took office, the leader of the party was radicalizing in real time. Trump and his campaign appeared to court QAnon fans on social media, with Trump retweeting QAnon personalities fourteen times on a single day in July 2020. People turn to conspiracy theories in moments of instability. “Conspiracy theories

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November 2020, when it became apparent that Trump would not concede defeat. In promoting blatantly fake theories about the election, supported by lawyers who tweeted QAnon slogans, Trump was warping truth in ways I used to witness only on small conspiratorial Facebook pages. The fringe wasn’t fringe anymore. Every day

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that I clocked in to work to report on this alternate reality, I felt like I was back at a Flat Earth conference. When two QAnon-backing lawyers (one of whom had been on the Trump campaign’s payroll days earlier) held a rally in support of overturning the election results

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question-and-answer panels at Flat Earth events. As I watched a livestream of that rally, I recognized someone in the comments section as a QAnon follower I’d interviewed previously. Earlier that year, she’d told me she’d converted to conspiracy belief after researching alternative COVID-19 theories. Other

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my personal life. A Facebook post about the temporary COVID-related closure of a restaurant in my nine-thousand-person hometown attracted comments full of QAnon memes. A close friend visited her own hometown to find her father promoting dangerous miracle cures based on Stella Immanuel’s claims. While I pushed

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about a hoax he saw on the internet, how am I supposed to politely debunk his premises? I could try my hand at addressing the QAnon rumors about my local restaurant. Here, I might make my neighbors listen to me by appealing to our common ground. I could point to our

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activities and kicking them off these sites makes it harder for fascist types to recruit. When the video-sharing app TikTok blocked hashtags associated with QAnon in July 2020, it removed one of the most straightforward means for Q supporters to discover and network with their peers. But while Silicon Valley

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, 2020, www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/plandemic-goes-viral-those-targeted-discredited-scientist-s-crusade-warn-n1202361. 123 “wouldn’t have found out about QAnon” Kelly Weill, “How ‘Plandemic’ Lures Normies down the Rabbit Hole,” Daily Beast, May 12, 2020, www.thedailybeast.com/how-conspiracy-theory-flick-plandemic-lures-normies

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Maddison Welch, ‘Pizzagate’ Gunman,” video, “Pizzagate’s Violent Legacy, Washington Post, February 16, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/02/16/pizzagate-qanon-capitol-attack. 158 “PIZZAGATE: The Bigger Picture” United States of America v. Edgar Maddison Welch, affidavit filed December 12, 2016, in US District Court for

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looking at the ‘likes’ on the Youtube page of Buckey Wolfe,” Twitter, January 10, 2019, https://twitter.com/travis_view/status/1083437810634248193. 161 apology to QAnon fans Jennifer Smith, “Haunting Video of ‘Thor’ Actor Isaac Kappy . . . ,” Daily Mail, May 15, 2019, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7033879/Haunting-final

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/2019/03/18/inside-youtubes-struggles-shut-down-video-new-zealand-shooting-humans-who-outsmarted-its-systems. 203 network with their peers Marianna Spring, “QAnon: TikTok Blocks QAnon Conspiracy Theory Hashtags,” BBC News, July 24, 2020, www.bbc.com/news/technology-53528400. 204 raised a flag about the article Evan Greer, “Facebook

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

by Max Fisher  · 5 Sep 2022  · 439pp  · 131,081 words

a movement with tens of thousands of followers, an internal FBI report identified it as a domestic terror threat. Throughout, Facebook’s recommendation engines promoted QAnon groups to huge numbers of readers, as if this were merely another club, helping to grow the conspiracy into the size of a minor political

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party, for seemingly no more elaborate reason than the continued clicks the QAnon content generated. Within Facebook’s muraled walls, though, belief in the product as a force for good seemed unshakable. The core Silicon Valley ideal

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death camp. Some had already been replaced with body doubles, a quiet first strike in Trump’s plan. Followers got more than a story. QAnon, as the movement called itself, became a series of online communities where believers gathered to parse Q’s posts. They looked for clues and hidden

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taken away your job. A sudden illness or disaster had upended your life. Social change had undermined your sense of society’s rightful order. (Many QAnons were well-off but had been sent into disorienting panics by, say, the election of a Black president or an uptick in diversity.) Conspiracies insist

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secrets you can unlock. Reframing chaos as order, telling believers they alone hold the truth, restores their sense of autonomy and control. It’s why QAnon adherents often repeat to one another their soothing mantra: “Trust the plan.” Extremism researchers would long speculate that many or all of Q’s posts

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didn’t want to know. The draw was in what his story offered, not in its authorship or objective truth. Even many researchers who tracked QAnon considered Q’s identity something of a footnote. For all of Q’s string-pulling manipulation, it was the users, the platforms, and the interlinking

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the primary trait for which the platforms maximized. By the time Americans realized that this was something dangerous, QAnon Facebook groups held millions of members, QAnon YouTube videos won millions of views, and QAnon Twitter accounts organized mass-harassment campaigns targeting celebrities they accused of bizarre, cannibalistic plots. An app that aggregated

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Q drops became one of the most popular downloads on the App Store. A book, QAnon: An Invitation to a Great Awakening, written by a collective of anonymous followers, reached #2 on Amazon’s bestseller list. Members spent their lives immersed

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in the community, clocking hours per day in the video chats and comment threads that had become their world. In May 2018, a QAnon YouTuber stormed an Arizona cement factory that he said was the center of a child-trafficking ring, streaming his confrontation to hundreds of thousands of

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mob boss, whom he believed Q had marked as a deep-state conspirator, and shot him to death. The FBI, in an internal memo, identified QAnon as a potential domestic-terror threat. Yet Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, as with Alex Jones, largely declined to act, allowing the movement, boosted by

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enforcement officers, drawn to its promises of strong-fisted order and retribution against liberals. The head of the NYPD union gave TV interviews with his QAnon mug in frame. Vice President Mike Pence was photographed alongside a Florida SWAT team officer wearing a Q badge. The movement migrated to Instagram, which

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promoted QAnon heavily enough that many of the yoga moms and lifestyle influencers who dominate the platform got swept up. But for all the feelings of autonomy

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was nothing after my father died. So I’m thankful for all in this boat with me.” It was one of the things that made QAnon so radicalizing. Joining often worsened the very sense of isolation and being adrift that had led people to it in the first place. With

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Carol join pages on parenting, Christianity, and conservative politics, then waited to see where Facebook took her. Within two days, the platform pushed her into QAnon. Over five more, it routed her, the researcher wrote in an internal report, through “a barrage of extreme, conspiratorial, and graphic content.” A separate

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report, also internal, found that half of Facebook’s QAnon population, numbering at least 2.2 million, had joined, as on YouTube, through “gateway groups.” It was confirmation of Renée DiResta’s warnings, ever since

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idea what it’s built here.” But Facebook only deepened its commitment to the feature that its own research had demonstrated was driving much of QAnon’s growth. It said that 100 million users, which it hoped to grow to 1 billion, were active in groups that had become where

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.” 6. Digital Nihilism IN HIS FRESHMAN year of college, Adam, the lifelong 4chan user from Dallas, shifted allegiance to 8chan. It was 2014, with QAnon and so much else still to come, but 8chan’s pledge to welcome Gamergaters, banned even from 4chan, had branded it as the last true

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and perhaps carved, the social media pathways through which much of 2020’s chaos would flow. Starting on groups for anti-vaxxers, general conspiracists, and QAnon, its story affirmed each of their worldviews. It escalated their sense of fighting a great conflict. And it activated them around a cause: opposition to

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2020, as the platforms gave rise to communities that feared lockdowns as exactly the power grab foretold in viral conspiracies like those in Plandemic or QAnon, social media algorithms identified once-obscure militia pages like Boogaloo as just the sort of thing that would draw those users even deeper into online

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communities had also begun taking on the life-or-death urgency of another cause with which the platforms had repeatedly interlinked them: QAnon. With the algorithm’s help, QAnon belief now infused all of these separate causes, much as Renée DiResta had discovered Facebook’s groups feature blurring anti-vaxxers with

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Pizzagate (the QAnon predecessor conspiracy) as far back as 2016. Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher, stumbled into a typical pathway that summer. She would search Facebook for “

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. The pattern was playing out across all the major platforms, converting Americans’ fear and confusion first into softer conspiracy belief, then into full-blown QAnonism, a huge engagement booster on the platforms. Wellness channels on YouTube and fitness influencers on Instagram drifted from astrology to coronavirus conspiracies to

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QAnon. Facebook’s largest anti-vaccine network filled with Q dog whistles. TikTok surged with Pizzagate conspiracies. One twenty-year-old TikToker, who’d helped

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a viral YouTube video. When Plandemic’s producers released a sequel, the video was predominantly pushed via Q pages. By the pandemic’s outset, the QAnon cause, amid its now almost impenetrably dense lore and esoterica, had sharpened around a core belief: President Trump and loyal generals were on the verge

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were told they played a crucial role, if only by following along for clues and helping to spread the word. That summer, ninety-seven professed QAnon believers would run in congressional primaries; twenty-seven of them would win. Two ran as independents. The other twenty-five were in-good-standing Republican

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nominees for the House of Representatives. QAnon memes and references especially dominated militia pages, escalating their sense that violence would be both righteous and inevitable. In late May, Ivan Hunter, the Boogaloo

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surrender power. Fears of voter suppression during the election, and of vigilante violence after it, were widespread. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, lamenting the pervasiveness of QAnon misinformation on Facebook, said, “I don’t know how the Facebook board of directors or their top employees can look themselves in the mirror. They

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societies would be safer with aspects of those products switched off, and that it was easily within their power to do so. Then came the QAnon crackdowns. Partial bans earlier in the year, removing select accounts or groups, had proven ineffective. Finally, Facebook and Instagram imposed total bans on the

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a Facebook post calling for Barack Obama to be hanged and another urging that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should get “a bullet to the head.” QAnon’s ascension, however, was overshadowed for Americans by another development: Trump had lost. Two days after the vote, with most news outlets yet to

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than a day, making it one of the fastest-growing in Facebook’s history. It filled with conspiracies, calls for violence, and especially invocations of QAnon. Still, with Trump humbled and soon to leave office, maybe the online extremism that he’d long encouraged might dissipate as well. After all, Silicon

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DEAD PEDOPHILES DON’T REOFFEND, a coded reference to Democrats. He was typical of the horde of social media users—some affiliated with militia or QAnon groups, some, like Barnett, just riding the algorithm—that had been, throughout 2020, working themselves up for the great battles that their conspiracies told

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been prepping for. Flyer-like memes, ubiquitous on the platform, urged attendance, often bearing militia slogans indicating the start of an armed revolt. Many included QAnon slogans calling it “the storm,” the blood-soaked purge that Q had foretold. And they carried a hashtag that echoed the plans of far-right

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real-world insurrection they were committing as an extension of the identities shaped by those platforms. Many of those who forced their way inside wore QAnon-branded shirts and hats. Jake Angeli, a thirty-two-year-old social media obsessive, had dressed in American-flag face paint, animal horns, and

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from Georgia, collapsed in a crush at a Capitol tunnel and died. Boyland’s family said she had found the online far right, and then QAnon, while searching for meaning in the aftermath of long struggles with addiction. Then there was Ashli Babbitt, a thirty-five-year-old Californian, Air

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Force veteran, and owner of a pool-supply company who’d reoriented her life around QAnon and tweeted fifty-plus times per day. Babbitt, wearing a Trump flag as a cape, forced herself through a broken glass window in a

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are rooted in the fundamental nature of the platforms. And they are severe enough to threaten American democracy itself. There was another change that January: QAnon all but collapsed. “We gave it our all. Now we need to keep our chins up and go back to our lives as best

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widely suspected to have written Q’s material, posted the morning of Biden’s inauguration. On Telegram—a social app that had grown popular with QAnon as Twitter had applied greater friction—he urged followers to respect Biden’s legitimacy. He added, “As we enter into the next administration please remember

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a link between feelings of powerlessness and conspiracy belief: “Beliefs in conspiracies,” Marina Abalakina-Paap, Political Psychology 20, no. 3, 1999. 56 sent into disorienting: “QAnon High Priest Was Just Trolling Away as Citigroup Tech Executive,” William Turton and Josh Brustein, Bloomberg, October 7, 2020. 57 Reframing chaos as order: Among

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“Measuring Individual Differences in Generic Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories across Cultures: Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire,” Martin Bruder et al., Frontiers in Psychology 4, 2013. 58 slid QAnon into the slipstream: This process will be discussed further in a later chapter. See, among many others: “The Prophecies of Q,” Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic

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, June 2020. “QAnon Booms on Facebook as Conspiracy Group Gains Mainstream Traction,” Deepa Seetharaman, Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2020. “Seven: ‘Where We Go One,’” Kevin Roose et

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Conspiracy Theory about Democrats Drinking Children’s Blood Topped Amazon’s Best-Sellers List,” Kaitlyn Tiffany, Vox, March 6, 2019. 61 many law-enforcement officers: “QAnon Is Attracting Cops,” Ali Breland, Mother Jones, September 28, 2020. 62 yoga moms and lifestyle influencers: “The Yoga World Is Riddled with Anti-Vaxxers and

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QAnon Believers,” Cecile Guerin, Wired UK, January 28, 2021. 63 “Gonna be honest patriots”: Tweet by @_qpatriot1776_, June 28, 2020, now removed by Twitter. Copy

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pages: See, for example: “Extremists Are Using Facebook to Organize for Civil War amid Coronavirus,” Tech Transparency Project Report, April 22, 2020. 37 QAnon belief now infused: “QAnon Booms on Facebook as Conspiracy Group Gains Mainstream Traction,” Deepa Seetharaman, Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2020. 38 Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation: Tweet by

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, 2020. twitter.com/wiczipedia/status/1265629272988954625 39 filled with Q dog whistles: “Facebook Bans One of the Anti-Vaccine Movement’s Biggest Groups for Violating QAnon Rules,” Aatif Sulleyman, Newsweek, November 18, 2020. 40 TikTok surged with Pizzagate:“‘PizzaGate’ Conspiracy Theory Thrives Anew in the TikTok Era,” Cecilia Kang and

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Sheera Frenkel, New York Times, June 27, 2020. 41 That summer, ninety-seven: “Here are the QAnon Supporters Running for Congress in 2020,” Alex Kaplan, Media Matters, January 7, 2020 (updated through July 27, 2021). 42 Hunter yelled, “Justice for Floyd”:

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, New York Times, January 11, 2021. 69 YouTube’s CEO, Susan Wojcicki, said only: “YouTube Tightens Rules on Conspiracy Videos, but Stops Short of Banning QAnon,” Jennifer Elias, CNBC, October 15, 2020. 70 at least 60,000 posts: Social Media in 2020: Incitement, Counteraction report, November 25, 2020. 71 “a

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your guns and take”: “The Radicalization of Kevin Greeson,” Connor Sheets, ProPublica and Birmingham News, January 15, 2021. 103 Boyland’s family said: “Death of QAnon Follower at Capitol Leaves a Wake of Pain,” Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Evan Hill, New York Times, May 30, 2021. 104 filmed Babbitt’s death

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Tina Peters Caused Commissioners to Almost Throw Peters Out of Public Hearing,” Western Slope Now, October 25, 2021. 15 “on the ballot in 26 states:” “QAnon candidates are on the ballot in 26 states,” Steve Reilly, et al., Grid, April 12, 2022. 16 issued a formal advisory: “Surgeon General Assails Tech

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

by Amanda Montell  · 14 Jun 2021  · 244pp  · 73,700 words

, even if you’re just sitting there. The reason millions of us binge cult documentaries or go down rabbit holes researching groups from Jonestown to QAnon is not that there’s some twisted voyeur inside us all that’s inexplicably attracted to darkness. We’ve all seen enough car crashes and

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. It’s exactly this paranoiac rejection of “mainstream” healthcare and leadership that gave such momentum to QAnon, whose rhetoric overlaps considerably with that of the “alternative wellness” sphere: “great awakening,” “ascension,” “5G.” The diagram of QAnon and New Agers looks more circular every day. It appeared an unlikely crossover, at first: that

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who joined Heaven’s Gate back in the day) to a similarly anti-government, anti-media, anti-doctor place. In the early 2010s, well before QAnon, the term “conspirituality” (a portmanteau of “conspiracy” and “spirituality”) was introduced to describe this rapidly growing politico-spiritual movement defined by two core principles: “the

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rocket fuel feeding conspirituality’s flame. Antivaxxers and Plandemic truthers would fall squarely into the category of conspirituality, but so would plenty of less conspicuously QAnon-related wellness aficionados: the sorts who might sign up for an essential oils MLM, for example, or wear “Namaslay” T-shirts to their whitewashed yoga

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way out. Trickily, not every conspiritualist even knows or is willing to admit that their beliefs have anything to do with QAnon. In fact, some of these believers regard the terms “QAnon,” “conspiracy theorist,” and “antivaxxer” as offensive “slurs.” And the more outsiders invoke these labels, the more firmly insiders dig in

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their heels. After all, both camps think the other is “brainwashed.” In broad strokes, QAnon started in 2017 as a fringe-y online conspiracy theory surrounding an alleged intelligence insider called Q. The ideology began as something like this: Q

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to reject mainstream government, vehemently scorn the press, and contest doubters at every turn. It’s all a necessary part of the ongoing “paradigm shift.” QAnon developed rallying cries, including “You are the news now” and “Enjoy the show,” referencing the impending “awakening,” or apocalypse. In September 2020, a Daily Kos

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/Civiqs poll reported that over half of the Republicans surveyed believed either partially or mostly in QAnon’s theories . . . at least the theories they were aware of. Because tumble further down the QAnon rabbit hole, and you’ll find Satanic Panic–esque, flagrantly fascist beliefs that not every subscriber even

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Clinton drinking the blood of children in order to prolong her life, the Rothschilds running a centuries-old ring of Satan worshippers, and beyond. But QAnon quickly grew to encapsulate much more than stereotypical far-right extremists. Take a soft turn to the left, and you’ll find a more outwardly

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in order to feed them only what they’re already interested in, a sprawling spiderweb of customized QAnon offshoots was able to form. In this manner, with language as its matter and energy, QAnon became like a black hole sucking in every breed of cultish twenty-first-century believer that crossed it

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answers to the world’s suffering—all the while camouflaging the fact that a unified belief system doesn’t actually exist. Like most manipulative cults, QAnon’s magnetism is largely the promise of special foreknowledge, which is available only to members of its enlightened underground collective. This allure is constructed with

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(and this will sound quite familiar now) an exhaustive sociolect of insider-y acronyms and keyboard symbols, “us”/“them” labels, and loaded language. In QAnon-speak, CBTS stands for “calm before the storm,” “truth seekers” are followers, and ignorant outsiders are “sheeple” or “agents of the elite.” #Savethechildren is an

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innocent-sounding QAnon shibboleth stolen from real child trafficking activists, used to hide in plain sight and attract newcomers. “5D consciousness” is a level of enlightenment that becomes

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one of many euphemisms equating evidence and fantasy. The glossary goes on and on. And it’s always changing, branching off into different “dialects” of QAnon-ese, in order to accommodate new additions to the belief system . . . and, so that social media algorithms don’t catch up, flag the language, and

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block or shadowban the accounts using it. New code words, hashtags, and rules for how to use them are introduced all the time. QAnon followers (some of whom are influencers with acolytes of their own) stand by for updates, often choosing to post only in their ephemeral Instagram Stories

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message will self-destruct in 24 hours.” This creates an even deeper level of exclusivity for the followers following them. To put it crudely, with QAnon, there are cults inside cults inside cults inside cults; it’s the ultimate cult-ception, and social media made it possible. Depending on their subsect

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of beliefs, QAnon participants feel free to define the broad talk of “sheeple” and “5D” in whatever way “resonates.” After all, for them, “truth is subjective.” It doesn

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’t matter to them that some interpretations of this language have led to enough real-world violence* that QAnon has become one of the most threatening domestic terror groups of our time. It also doesn’t matter that at its core

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, QAnon is just another madcap apocalyptic cult in a line of them that goes back centuries. The updated cast of characters is new, and so is

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media, but baseless doomsday predictions and ideas of dark forces secretly controlling everything are practically trite. All this and still, those wrapped up in the QAnon-to-conspirituality “culture of shared understanding” will find a way to keep rolling with it no matter what. Any question or wrinkle can be conveniently

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it sounded like a made-for-TV movie: “Follow the money,” “I’ve said too much,” “Some things must remain classified to the very end.” QAnon has been described as “an unusually absorbing alternate-reality game” where online users play their imaginary roles as bakers, hungrily anticipating the puzzle of each

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immersive experience generates a kind of compulsive behavior similar to addiction. In a cognitive analysis of QAnon for Psychology Today, Pierre noted that with QAnon, “the conflation of fantasy and reality isn’t so much a risk as a built-in feature.” Some of the psychological quirks thought to drive

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secrets to which the rest of us ‘sheeple’ are blind,” Pierre explains. After platforms like Twitter and Instagram started catching on to the dangers of QAnon and cracking down, supporters had to get more creative with their language in order to communicate without getting deleted. This is part of why

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QAnon messages began appearing in the form of aesthetic quotegrams: graphically designed maxims that blend in with the “keep calm and manifest”–type self-care memes

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innocently populating most users’ Instagram feeds. This development soon became known as “Pastel QAnon.” Quotegrams—with their comely fonts and generic syntax—serve as a form of loaded language themselves, designed to yank on users’ heartstrings, to get them

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on-ramp leading seekers to something much more sinister. With no tangible organizational structure, no single leader, no cohesive doctrine, and no concrete exit costs, QAnon is not exactly in the same cultish category as, say, Heaven’s Gate or Jonestown. But a fully immersed

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QAnon follower couldn’t just go cold turkey. For those fully submerged in the world of “the awakening” and “the research,” climbing out of the rabbit

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-worth and control during uncertain times,” elucidates Pierre. Even if former believers come out to denounce QAnon, the existential consequences are enough to keep true die-hards under. Not everyone finds their way into a QAnon-level internet cult, but platforms from Facebook to Tumblr are what help life feel important and

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, 2020, https://www.instyle.com/beauty/health-fitness/yoga-racism-white-supremacy. over half of the Republicans surveyed: Tommy Beer, “Majority of Republicans Believe the QAnon Conspiracy Theory Is Partly or Mostly True, Survey Finds,” Forbes, September 2, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/09/02/majority-of-republicans

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-believe-the-qanon-conspiracy-theory-is-partly-or-mostly-true-survey-finds/?sh=3d8d165b5231. The glossary goes on and on: “Conspirituality-To-QAnon (CS-to-Q) Keywords and Phrases,” Conspirituality.net, https://con spirituality.net/keywords-and-phrases

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/ nightmarish crimes: Lois Beckett, “QAnon: a Timeline of Violence Linked to the Conspiracy Theory.” Guardian. October 16, 2020, https://www

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.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/15/qanon-violence-crimes-timeline. dystopian video game: Alyssa Rosenberg, “I Understand the Temptation to Dismiss

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QAnon. Here’s Why We Can’t,” Washington Post, August 7, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08

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/07/qanon-isnt-just-conspiracy-theory-its-highly-effective-game/. a cognitive analysis of QAnon: Joe Pierre, “The Psychological Needs That QAnon Feeds,” Psychology Today, August 12, 2020, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/202008/the

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-psychological-needs-qanon-feeds. About the Author AMANDA MONTELL is a writer and language scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Wordslut: A

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the late ’80s by a self-proclaimed ESP master (and proud Trump supporter) named J. Z. Knight, who has been quoted spewing all kinds of QAnon-esque rhetoric and generally bigoted nonsense (like that all gay men used to be Catholic priests). But Ramtha devotees—which have included a handful of

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A-list celebrities—hear what they want to hear and ignore the rest. * Since 2018, QAnon supporters have committed murders, made bombs, destroyed churches, derailed freight trains, livestreamed themselves monologuing about Q while engaged in a high-speed police car chase

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

by Adrian Hon  · 14 Sep 2022  · 371pp  · 107,141 words

. He’s barely making enough to cover the payments on his car, so he sighs—and accepts. At home, his partner obsessively “researches” the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory on obscure forums, videos, and blogs. It’s not as relaxing as watching TV, but uncovering clues and drawing connections makes him feel

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universities in the US and UK, even the richest democracies have proven vulnerable to its temptations. It’s also in democracies that conspiracy theories like QAnon have spread so widely and caused so much damage. In Chapter Seven, I argue that modern conspiracy theories are best compared to ARGs in how

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online. The exceptions, however, have been damaging enough, particularly when they’ve been amplified by politicians and celebrities on social media—like the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, responsible in part for the storming of the US Capitol Building in 2021. The most popular modern conspiracy theories have gained purchase not

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that their communities have no checks on unfounded speculation, which has led to dangerous and fatal consequences—even when people have the best of intentions. QAnon is so sprawling, it’s hard to know where people join. One week, it’s the false rumour that 5G cell towers spread disease, another

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week it’s Wayfair.com trafficking children inside unusually expensive furniture; who knows what next week will bring?2 But QAnon’s millions of followers often seem to begin their journey with the same refrain: “I’ve done my research.”3 I’d heard that line

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. I’d know: I wrote a novel-length walkthrough of The Beast when I was meant to be studying for my degree at Cambridge.7 QAnon is not an ARG, or a role-playing game (RPG), or even a live-action role-playing game (LARP). It’s a dangerous conspiracy theory

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, whether by intention or by coincidence. In both cases, “do your research” leads curious onlookers to a cornucopia of brain-tingling information. In other words, QAnon may be the world’s first gamified conspiracy theory. By some measures, a staggering 15 percent of all Americans adhere to

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QAnon’s beliefs.8 ARGs never made it that big or made that much money: they arrived too early in the internet’s evolution, and it

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or months. No one would mistake the clean lines of my flowcharts for the snarl of links that makes up the Q-Web, a notorious QAnon chart crammed with hundreds of supposedly connected things like #MeToo, Monsanto, and J. Edgar Hoover, but the principles are similar: one discovery leads to the

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the same insouciance when confronted with inconsistencies or falsified predictions; they can always explain away errors with new stories and theories. What’s special about QAnon and ARGs is that these errors can be fixed almost instantly, before doubt or ridicule can set in. And what’s really special about

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QAnon is how it’s absorbed all other conspiracy theories to become a kind of ur–conspiracy theory such that it seems pointless to call out

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inconsistencies.13 In any case, who would you even be calling out when so many QAnon theories come from followers rather than its gnomic founder, Q? Yet the line between creator and player in ARGs has also long been blurry. That

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the game more fun, and ultimately, because everyone expects it these days. That’s not the case with QAnon. Yes, anyone who uses the popular 4chan and 8chan forums, longtime homes of QAnon, understands that anonymity is baked into their systems such that posters often create entire threads where they argue against

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themselves in the guise of multiple anonymous users. But QAnon has spread far beyond those forums, and it’s likely that more casual adherents have no idea how anonymity works there. The line between manipulator

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Twitter favourites and upvotes on Reddit forum posts and comments, previously apolitical shitposters can end up slipping into the far right. This community encouragement sets QAnon devotees aside from pop culture’s usual conspiracy theorist, who sits in a dark basement stringing together photos and newspaper clippings on their “crazy wall

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molecular biology essays most certainly were not. Anne Helen Petersen, then a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News, found the same feeling extended to “a QAnon guy” she interviewed, who told her how deeply pleasurable it was to analyse and write his “stories” after his kids go to sleep. Online communities

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every way to “real” friendships, an attenuated version that’s better than nothing but not something that anyone with options would choose. Yet ARGs and QAnon (and games and fandom and so many other things) demonstrate there’s an immediacy and scale and relevance to online communities that can be more

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mysterious reality-altering invasion.21 Like the rest of SCP, this was all in good fun, but I recently discovered LinkNYC is tangled up in QAnon conspiracy theories. To be fair, you can say the same thing about pretty much every modern technology, but it’s not surprising their monolith-like

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Speculation had become reality. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a touch concerned that Cicada 3301 now lies squarely in the QAnon vortex and in the Q-Web chart.33 My defence that the cicada puzzle in The Code was “a big coincidence” (albeit delivered with an

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helpful when conspiracy theorists “yes, and…” each other into shooting up a pizza parlour or storming the US Capitol. And because there is no coherent QAnon community in the same sense as the Cloudmakers, there’s no convention of SPEC tags. In their absence, YouTube first annotated

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article, then banned many entirely; Twitter banned 7,000 accounts and restricted 150,000 more, NBC reported; and Facebook banned all QAnon groups and pages.35 These are useful steps. Deplatforming works.36 It reduces the reach of extremist content and destroys the delicate network of connections

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between followers. Even if some migrate to surviving social networks and forums, many won’t bother. Still, technical fixes cannot stop QAnon from spreading in social media comments or private chat groups or unmoderated forums. The only way to stop people from mistaking speculation from fact is

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entire enterprise. If players took too long to find the $200,000 treasure at the conclusion of the story, we might run out of money. QAnon can survive on cryptic messages because it doesn’t have a specific timeline or goal, let alone a production budget or paid staff. There’s

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you can make it, when you’re doing a narrative-based game. This content generation/consumption/playing asymmetry is, I think, just a fact. But QAnon ‘solved’ it by being able to co-opt all content that already exists and… encourages and allows you to create new content that counts and

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is fair play in-the-game.”38 But even QAnon needs some specificity, hence its frequent references to actual people, places, events, and so on. It was useful to be cryptic when I had to

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can feel crass to compare ARGs to a conspiracy theory that’s caused so much harm. But this reveals the crucial difference between them: in QAnon, the stakes are so high, any action is justified. If you truly believe an online store or a pizza parlour is engaging in child trafficking

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account, involved 1.4 million people. There’s a parallel between the seemingly unmoderated theorists of r/findbostonbombers and the Citizen app and those in QAnon: none feel any responsibility for spreading unsupported speculation as fact. What they do feel is that anything should be solvable, as Laura Hall, immersive environment

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manipulated paranoia) scares the living shit out of me.”45 WHAT ARGS CAN TEACH US The twin dangers of online misinformation and conspiracy theories like QAnon have led institutions to design games attempting to inoculate players against their allure. Cambridge University’s Go Viral! helps users spot COVID-19 conspiracies, while

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, as is John Cook’s Cranky Uncle.46 It’s easy to get progressive audiences to download these apps; unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine QAnon believers doing so. And while inoculation may help people develop critical thinking skills, I have to confess that a lifetime of training has not prevented

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settings when the settings keep changing every year, and when every other incentive is driving them to share and reveal more. What about an anti-QAnon ARG? Several people have asked me to help design clandestine ARGs that would infiltrate and discredit conspiracy theory communities from the inside out. Though these

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me of “counterintelligence” on the basis of this book. No ARG can heal the deep mistrust and fear and economic and spiritual malaise that underlie QAnon and other dangerous conspiracy theories, especially not a manipulative one. There are hints at ARG-like things that could work, though—not in directly combatting

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QAnon’s appeal, but in channeling people’s energy and zeal for community-based problem-solving toward better causes. Take the COVID Tracking Project, an attempt

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more. Mattathias Schwartz, contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, believes it’s that lack of trust that leads people to conspiracy theories like QAnon: “Q’s [followers]… are starving for information. Their willingness to chase breadcrumbs is a symptom of ignorance and powerlessness. There may be something to their

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structure upon which higher-level analysis and journalism can be built. And if they can’t find the truth, they’re willing to say so. QAnon seems just as open. Everything is online. Every discussion, every idea, every theory is all joined together in a warped edifice where speculation becomes fact

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never get bored. There’s always new information to make sense of, always a new puzzle to solve, always a new enemy to take down. QAnon fills the void of information that states have created—not with facts, but with fantasy. If we don’t want

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QAnon to fill that void, someone else has to. Ideally, democratic governments would fund institutions to fulfil this role, as Taiwan does with its arsenal of

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whether we can build these institutions without being diverted by the rest of our world being turned into even more captivating games. As threatening as QAnon is, social media’s game-like nature has warped the behaviour of billions more people. With everything from sex and romance to shopping and stock

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of gamification. The early interest that writers Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen showed in my essay on the similarities between alternate reality games and QAnon boosted my confidence immeasurably, as did the MetaFilter community’s enthusiasm for my writing on workplace gamification. But above all, it’s the tireless work

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Tale of the A.I. Trail,” Vavatch Orbital, updated September 2, 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/20170330225001/http://vavatch.co.uk/guide. 8. “Understanding QAnon’s Connection to American Politics, Religion, and Media Consumption,” Public Religion Research Institute, May 27, 2021, www.prri.org/research

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/qanon-conspiracy-american-politics-report. 9. “Perplex City,” Wikipedia, updated August 23, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplex_City. 10. “The Key to the Q-

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, YouTube, video, 23:52, August 14, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx8pfheh6aI. 32. “Cracking the Code of Cicada 3301.” 33. Mike Rothschild, “Who Is QAnon, the Internet’s Most Mysterious Poster?” Daily Dot, updated May 21, 2021, www.dailydot.com/debug/who-is-q-anon. 34. “Barkun Cited in VICE

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Official Blog, YouTube, October 15, 2020, https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/harmful-conspiracy-theories-youtube; Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny, “Twitter Bans 7,000 QAnon Accounts, Limits 150,000 Others as Part of Broad Crackdown,” NBC News, updated July 21, 2020, www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/twitter-bans-7

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-000-qanon-accounts-limits-150-000-others-n1234541; “An Update to How We Address Movements and Organizations Tied to Violence,” Facebook, Meta, updated November 9, 2021, https

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-tied-to-violence. 36. Will Bedingfield, “Deplatforming Works, But It’s Not Enough,” Wired, January 15, 2021, www.wired.co.uk/article/deplatforming-parler-bans-qanon. 37. “The Numbers,” Lostpedia, accessed November 28, 2021, https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Numbers. 38. Dan Hon (@hondanhon), “re the content generation problem for

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists

by Julia Ebner  · 20 Feb 2020  · 309pp  · 79,414 words

with malicious software hiding behind the stolen profiles of young women. Throughout 2018, hardline Brexit campaigns were boosted by the international conspiracy theory networks of QAnon. By January 2019, far-right hackers had leaked the personal details of hundreds of German politicians. And March 2019 saw the livestream of New Zealand

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. Follow Q down the rabbit hole into a collectively imagined world so massive that it can claim to explain the past, present and future. Enter QAnon. 1 Painstakingly kept records of celebrity bloodlines, carefully curated news pieces and a lexicon full of sci-fi Hollywood movie references. This is where new

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origins of HIV and the existence of aliens hushed up by scientists and the media.2 I find myself surrounded by tens of thousands of QAnon supporters who believe that Trump is secretly working to expose a paedophile ring involving celebrities and political elites who have covertly been running the country

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fiction creation, thereby boosting alternative explanations for real-world observations – from political dynamics to natural phenomena.8 ‘Ready for the Great Awakening?’ one anon (as QAnon adherents call themselves) asks me. To him, terrorist incidents are false flags, plane crashes are planned and diseases are designed to kill. ‘Then follow the

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resident Matthew P. Wright, who blocked off a highway close to the Hoover Dam in an armoured vehicle in June 2018, had subscribed to the QAnon motto: ‘For where we go one, we go all’.17 Two years earlier, Edgar Welsh, firefighter and father from South Carolina and firm believer in

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Pizzagate – the QAnon predecessor conspiracy theory which claimed that Democrats were running a massive child-abuse network from their alleged headquarters at Comet Ping Pong, a DC pizza

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restaurant – opened fire in the pizzeria to free nonexistent children.18 In January 2019, a QAnon supporter killed his brother with a sword because he believed that he was a lizard.19 ‘Military, we need a plan and must expose evil

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often have obscure origins – some even start as a joke or prank. The Book of Q, an early collection of Q’s messages, suggested that QAnon might be ‘the longest lasting LARP (Live Action Role Play, aka prank)’ in the history of 4chan.20 Several media outlets and Wikileaks have also

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speculated that QAnon started as a hoax that got out of hand.21 BuzzFeed even ran an article with the headline ‘It’s looking extremely likely that

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QAnon is a leftist prank on Trump supporters’.22 Anonymous blames 0hour1, a troll who was excluded from the hacker collective.23 There are a few

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1980s.24 Since then thousands of artists across Europe and America have adopted the name Luther Blissett to stage media pranks and cultural sabotage initiatives. QAnon uses several references to the plot and language of the novel Q, which was published under the pen name Luther Blissett in 1999. I join

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. Are there any specific areas you might feel you are strong in?’ Max replies. He is also a member of QEurope, QNN (an abbreviation of QAnon), Operation Name and Shame, Meme Warfare, The Freedom Fighters and several others. ‘Such people like you are useful for spreading the information. Here you can

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roles. You’ve got your skills, therefore you are allowed to use those skills. I’m more of an archivist.’ The QAnon archiving system, I have to admit, is impressive. QAnon adherents might be better sorted than some government bureaucratic divisions. I scroll through archive after archive of fake news, nonsensical graphics

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denounce the anti-cyberhate campaigns launched by Facebook, Twitter, Google and others.25 In the world of QAnon, the tech giants are all part of the massive conspiracy. You can sense the excitement in the QAnon groups. Joe is a man in his fifties who claims to have been ‘so awake’ since

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:31 Just to shut the Flat Earthers up, Q. Is the earth flat? No. Q. Is JFK Jr alive? No. Q. The success of QAnon is baffling. QAnon mutated from conspiracy theory on the fringes of 4chan and 8chan into a mass movement that has conquered mainstream social media channels as well

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. In 2018 alone, ISD’s social media monitors identified close to 30 million uses of the word ‘QAnon’ across Twitter, YouTube and other blogs and forums such as Reddit and 4chan. On YouTube, QAnon videos often attract hundreds of thousands of views, and self-described bakers are in the tens of thousands

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, with offshoots in almost every part of America and Europe. QAnon followers have a significant overlap with the Reddit board r/The_Donald, one of the alt-right’s favourite mingling hotspots, according to data analysis

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from the influential twenty-first-century news website Vox. In August 2018, a photo of the leading QAnon conspiracy theorist Michael Lebron visiting Trump in the Oval Office appeared on social media and sparked controversy.32 Even celebrities, like the actress Roseanne Barr

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and former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, jumped on the bandwagon and helped to popularise it.33 At some point, QAnon videos would appear first when searching ‘Tom Hanks’ on YouTube.34 When you enter the words ‘the truth about’ in the YouTube search box, you

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side to combining different conspiracy theories – you can unite conspiracy theorists from all corners of the internet and boost the overall reach of the movement. QAnons have demonstrated considerable ideological (and logical) flexibility in their attempts to tailor their tales to different audiences. They have co-opted the Yellow Vest demonstrations

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involvement in human trafficking. In an investigation carried out with ITV, I found that campaigns like #BrexitBetrayal and #StandUp4Brexit were paired with the hashtags of QAnon and the Great Awakening.36 A survey showed that Brexit and Trump voters were much more likely to believe in conspiracy theories about immigration than

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bring extremist viewpoints into the mainstream.41 Online tactics to spread conspiracy theories are getting ever more creative. ‘Regarding red pilling everyone – getting True Lies QAnon message out,’ Raven posts in the Discord group, ‘I was just thinking how many random people from all over the world use the live streaming

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a folder for Q business card templates,’ Raven writes. ‘These are similar to memes, but card format, and with a link back to True Lies QAnon on YT, or a website, or a hashtag that gets them connected to the anons. I want to take one or two best designs and

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get them processed through Vistaprint.’ QAnon has not come only to the UK. There are also offshoots in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, the Balkans and other countries. The founder of

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that the most popular party among protesters was Marine Le Pen’s Front National.28 Online far-right groups such as RWU, European National and QAnon have been leading the expansion of the movement into other geographies. In the UK, spin-off revolts saw demonstrators blocking bridges in central London and

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2019.29 Some of them were wearing badges of the anti-Muslim groups English Defence League and Wolves of Odin. In Canada and across Europe, QAnon activists have added a pinch of conspiracy theory, with protesters decorating their vests with Qs. ‘If they want a war we’ll give them a

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WASP Love. He emanated from the image-board trolling culture and was an active proponent of ‘meme magic’, like the members of Reconquista Germanica and QAnon. ‘I’ve only been lurking for a year and a half, yet what I’ve learned here is priceless,’ he wrote, thanking his fellow 8chan

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at https://rusi.org/commentary/cryptocurrencies-and-terrorist-financing-risk-hold-panic. 12Ibid. 8: follow q 1In this chapter, my conversations with roughly a dozen QAnon adherents were synthesised into a just few characters for better readability. 2For more information about these classic conspiracy theories see C. Stempel, T. Hargrove and

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_q-PzZfdJM4ItzmQIF9gfPrOQxk/view. 21See for example https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/its-looking-extremely-likely-that-qanon-is-probably-a and https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1001139404805738498. 22Ryan Broderick, ‘People Think This Whole QAnon Conspiracy Theory is A Prank on Trump Supporters’, Buzzfeed, 8 August 2018. Available at https://web.archive

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/article/pii/B9780123855220000056. 29See https://twitter.com/danieleganser/status/824953776280854528?lang=en. 30See https://8ch.net//qresearch//res/4279775.html#4280231. 31See https://www.qanon.pub. 32Kyle Feldscher, ‘QAnon-believing “conspiracy analyst” meets Trump in the White House’, CNN, 25 August 2018. Available at https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/25/politics

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/donald-trump-qanon-white-house/index.html. 33Will Sommer, ‘What is QAnon? The Craziest Theory of the Trump Era Explained’, Daily Beast, 7 June 2018. Available at https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-is

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-qanon-the-craziest-theory-of-the-trump-era-explained. 34Fruzsina Eordogh, ‘What is QAnon, the Conspiracy Theory Attracting Alex Jones, Roseanne Barr and … a Guy from “Vanderpump Rules”’, Elle, 7 August 2018. Available

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at https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a22665744/qanon-conspiracy-theory-explainer/. 35Emma Grey Ellis, ‘Win or Lose, the Alex Jones Lawsuit Will Help Redefine Free Speech’, Wired, 16 August 2018. Available at https

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Pozner, Lenny here Presley, Elvis here Prideaux, Sue here Prince Albert Police here Pro Chemnitz here ‘pseudo-conservatives’ here Putin, Vladimir here Q Britannia here QAnon here, here, here, here Quebec mosque shooting here Quilliam Foundation here, here, here Quinn, Zoë here Quran here racist slurs (n-word) here Radio 3Fourteen

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, here, here, here Charlottesville rally and here, here and Great Replacement theory here hackers and here New Balance shoes and here pro-Trump memes here QAnon and here, here, here, here, here retweets Britain First videos here RWU and here Trump Singles here Truth Decay here Tufecki, Zeynep here Twitch here

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics

by Elle Reeve  · 9 Jul 2024

white supremacy was good) and radical virgins called incels (whose red pill was that feminism had ruined society) long before I’d heard it from QAnoners (whose red pill was that Trump was fighting a secret satanic pedophile cabal that had seized control of the government). Many had been searching for

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ideas, but over time, 8chan became an incubator for conspiracy theories and violent ideologies, like incels, the alt-right, and later, after he left it, QAnon. 8chan made Fred an internet supervillain. Fred likes to say that if he hadn’t created 8chan, someone else would have. But a close look

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, in fact, hate his fucking dad.) My conversation with Dr. Loftin came before these online forums spilled over into the real world—before Charlottesville, before QAnon and the storming of the Capitol. When I asked Loftin in 2021 what had shifted in her thinking, she said she now believed a much

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case she tried to run, and that the National Guard was involved. This person claimed to have Q-level clearance. This was the birth of QAnon. After a month, Q moved to 8chan, where he was welcomed with open arms. Fred, who had resigned as admin but was still working for

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blue letter Q. Fred didn’t think much of it at the time. But by the time I visited Manila, there had been several major QAnon incidents, including a man arrested on terrorism charges after he used an armored truck to block traffic at the Hoover Dam, demanding the Justice Department

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had drawn a Q in the palm of his hand and flashed it at his hearing on charges he’d murdered a Staten Island mobster. QAnon was growing, but there wasn’t much about it in the mainstream news—in part because it required explaining that the conspiracy theory held that

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pressure, the internet services company Cloudflare dropped 8chan as a customer, taking it offline. Fred celebrated. It gave him a new mission. He told the QAnon Anonymous podcast, “If they want to bring 8chan back online, just be aware that I will do everything I can to keep it down because

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website when 8chan went down. When it was reborn as 8kun, Mann was furious—it was so Q-centric. Back when the first wave of QAnon had come to 8chan, “we were surprised to see so many baby boomers come on imageboards,” Mann said. He’d thought the new users would

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filter out into other boards and grow their audiences, but it didn’t happen. “All they thought about was QAnon.” For a while, he thought they were just a nuisance. “It wasn’t until 2020 that I realized that we weren’t trying to be

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. Fred turned his focus to trying to prove Q’s real identity. At the time, this didn’t seem like the most important question about QAnon—it wasn’t as interesting as what the conspiracy theory said about the human psyche and America. But naming the real Q mattered, because it

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them. The conspiracy grew and Q-influencers gained fame on YouTube, Instagram, Telegram, Twitter, and lesser-known video sites, like Rumble or DLive. Asked about QAnon by NBC, President Trump said, “They are very strongly against pedophilia. And I agree with that.” Surely he knew there wasn’t a secret satanic

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course, only as self-defense. Parallel to the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, and far-right militias, there was a truly mass movement growing with QAnon. The QAnon types did not have much in common with the Proud Boys, but they shared the same enemy: antifa and Black Lives Matter. They also shared

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were in a better mood. A man in a Q hoodie sat in a tree. I asked him if he’d seen a ten-part QAnon film called Fall of the Cabal (which wove together conspiracy theories about Covid vaccines, Jews, and the JFK assassination, plus some 4chan slang). “Yes, absolutely

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had been stolen, meaning the most basic element of our democracy was fake, and maybe had been fake for a long time. Others believed in QAnon. QAnon was the product of blackpilled thinking on an astonishing scale—built over time by thousands of unhappy people competing to imagine the worst possible explanation

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” flag. Some people who’d been maced by police staggered around, crying, shocked that the cops had tried to stop them. A man in a QAnon shirt screamed in my face for a solid five minutes. In a few weeks, I’d see that same screaming face in the New York

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the favor? A protester told me a woman had been shot in the neck. (I found out later she was an air force veteran and QAnoner named Ashli Babbitt.) Within hours, in far right Telegram channels, they’d turned her death into a logo—a woman’s face in front of

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to redpill this person,” as so many on the alt-right had once wanted, Spencer said. The result was not a fascist Chad autocracy, but QAnon. “You redpilled the masses, and they became, at best, delusional. At worst, they—Ashli Babbitt got shot in the neck while raiding the Capitol.” Spencer

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leader, the promise to restore the nation to its former glory, the fake threat to masculinity, the desire to use violence to eliminate the threat. QAnon’s numbers were many times the alt-right’s. It attracted more women and more people who were fully functioning members of society. The Stop

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at his core, he was who he was. Spencer told me he liked Christian nationalism, because he thought associating the religion with the mania of QAnon would help destroy it. “I hate Christianity, okay?” Spencer said. “I hate Jesus Christ. I would have fucking oppressed that hell out of—I know

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York Times, August 4, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/technology/8chan-shooting-manifesto.html He told the QAnon Anonymous podcast: “Episode 63: Battle of 8chan feat Fredrick Brennan,” QAnon Anonymous podcast, October 2019. He presented his evidence on the podcast: “#166 Country of Liars,” Reply All podcast, September 2020

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. the New York Times published a linguistic analysis: David D. Kirkpatrick, “Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints,” New York Times, February 19, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/19/technology

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/qanon-messages-authors.html Asked about QAnon by NBC: Dylan Scott, “Trump Town Hall: President Says He Agrees with Part of the QAnon Conspiracy Theory,” Vox, October 15, 2020. https://www.vox.com/2020/10/15/21518697/donald

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-trump-town-hall-what-is-qanon-conspiracy-theory When Trump campaign spokeswoman: Max Cohen, “White House Press Secretary Says She’s Never

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Heard Trump Talk about QAnon,” Politico, August 20, 2020. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/20/kayleigh-mcenany-trump

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-qanon-399273 CHAPTER 14: FANTASIZING ABOUT SELF-DEFENSE (Tarrio worked as a federal): Aram Roston, “Exclusive: Proud Boys

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, 167, 168, 169 ownership of, 129 “Pepe the Frog” icon and, 1, 43, 135, 141, 152, 210–11 politicized violence and, 141–43, 150–51 QAnon versus, 233 racism and, 39, 85, 86, 89, 90, 100, 141, 146, 149, 162–64, 169, 171, 172 red pill narrative and, 3 Reeve’s

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Islamic extremism and, 115–16 nazis and creeps on, 105, 111, 126 popularity, as million-user site, 105–6 Poway, California, synagogue shooter and, 213 QAnon and, 11, 214–15, 218 racism and, 126, 163 Reeve paying attention to activity on, 125, 126 rules for, 11 trolls on, 119–20, 126

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board and neo-Nazi posts, 15 “Pepe the Frog” icon and, 1, 2, 210–11 /pol/ postings and Stormfront white nationalists on, 123, 135–36 QAnon and, 214 racism and, 110, 126, 127, 163 Reeve paying attention to posts and users of, 37, 126, 133 subversion of “Tay” on, 120–22

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who are not neurotypical, 47–49, 52, 104, 111–17 “weaponized autism” and, 47 white nationalism and, 38 See also alt-right; 8chan; 4chan; incels; QAnon; Wizardchan; specific sites internet atheists, 55, 56, 63, 76 Iraq War, 36, 97, 124, 125, 200 J January 6 (2021) Capitol riot, 1, 2, 52

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McInnes as founder, 222 “Milkshake” and, 223, 229, 243 Reeve reporting on, 222, 223–24, 243 Trump and, 223 Putin, Vladimir, 82, 97, 102 Q QAnon, 52 baby boomers and, 217 birth of, 214 black pill thinking and, 229 8chan and, 11, 214–15, 218 Fall of the Cabal (film), 228

…

pill narrative and, 3, 228 satanic pedophile cabal in government and, 3, 215, 218, 229 Trump and, 218 Trump supporters and, 229 Watkinses and, 218 QAnon Anonymous podcast, 215–16 Quinn, Zoe, 103 R racismalt-right and, 85, 86, 89, 90, 100, 141, 146, 149, 163, 169, 171, 172 alt-right

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military and, 235 movie Patton and, 234–35 political cartoon (2015), 119 presidential election (2016), 124–25, 130–32, 212, 234 Proud Boys and, 223 QAnon and, 218 racism and, 125 Reeve interviews supporters of, 124–25 second impeachment, 171 supporters of, 225, 226, 227–29, 235, 243 World War II

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI

by Yuval Noah Harari  · 9 Sep 2024  · 566pp  · 169,013 words

radical challenge to the naive view of information. Populist leaders such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, and populist movements and conspiracy theories such as QAnon and the anti-vaxxers, have argued that all traditional institutions that gain authority by claiming to gather information and discover truth are simply lying. Bureaucrats

…

deliberately spreading disinformation to gain power and privileges for themselves at the expense of “the people.” The rise of politicians like Trump and movements like QAnon has a specific political context, unique to the conditions of the United States in the late 2010s. But populism as an antiestablishment worldview long predated

…

of Bohemia and Moravia in 1500. Even today his ideas continue to shape the world, and many current theories about a global satanic conspiracy—like QAnon—draw upon and perpetuate his fantasies. While it would be an exaggeration to argue that the invention of print caused the European witch-hunt craze

…

cannibalistic witches who worship Satan have infiltrated the U.S. administration and numerous other governments and institutions around the world. This conspiracy theory—known as QAnon—was first disseminated online on American far-right websites and eventually gained millions of adherents worldwide. It is impossible to know the exact number, but

…

when Facebook decided in August 2020 to take action against the spread of QAnon, it deleted or restricted more than ten thousand groups, pages, and accounts associated with it, the largest of which had 230,000 followers. Independent investigations

…

on Facebook had more than 4.5 million aggregate followers, though there was likely some overlap in the membership.32 QAnon has also had far-reaching consequences in the offline world. QAnon activists played an important role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.33 In July 2020

…

, a QAnon follower tried to storm the residence of the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, in order to “arrest” him.34 In

…

October 2021, a French QAnon activist was charged with terrorism for planning a coup against the French government.35 In the 2020 U.S. congressional elections, twenty-two Republican candidates

…

and two independents identified as QAnon followers.36 Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman representing Georgia, publicly said that many of Q’s claims “have really proven to be true,”37

…

them too. No need for any humans in the loop. Equally alarmingly, we might increasingly find ourselves conducting lengthy online discussions about the Bible, about QAnon, about witches, about abortion, or about climate change with entities that we think are humans but are actually computers. This could make democracy untenable. Democracy

…

can then be used to persuade us to vote for particular politicians, buy particular products, or adopt radical beliefs? What might happen when LaMDA meets QAnon? A partial answer to that question was given on Christmas Day 2021, when nineteen-year-old Jaswant Singh Chail broke into Windsor Castle armed with

…

Performance,” SSRN, May 8, 2023, ssrn.com/abstract=4441311. 31. Brinkmann et al., “Machine Culture.” 32. Julia Carrie Wong, “Facebook Restricts More Than 10,000 QAnon and US Militia Groups,” Guardian, Aug. 19, 2020, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/19/facebook

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Advocates Arrested for Jan 6 U.S. Capitol Attack,” Reuters, April 15, 2021, www.reuters.com/world/us/fbi-chief-says-five-qanon-conspiracy-advocates-arrested-jan-6-us-capitol-attack-2021-04-14/. 34. “Canadian Man Faces Weapons Charges in Attack on PM Trudeau’s Home,” Al

…

.thetimes.co.uk/article/remy-daillet-far-right-coup-plot-france-army-officers-qanon-ds22j6g05. 36. Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko, Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2021), 2. 37. John Bowden, “QAnon-Promoter Marjorie Taylor Greene Endorses Kelly Loeffler in Georgia Senate Bid,” Hill, Oct

…

. 15, 2020, thehill.com/homenews/campaign/521196-qanon-promoter-marjorie-taylor-greene-endorses-kelly-loeffler-in-ga-senate

…

/. 38. Camila Domonoske, “QAnon Supporter Who Made Bigoted Videos Wins Ga. Primary, Likely Heading to Congress,” NPR, Aug. 12, 2020, www.npr

…

.org/2020/08/12/901628541/qanon-supporter-who-made-bigoted-videos-wins-ga-primary-likely-heading-to-congre. 39. Nitasha Tiku, “The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth

by Elizabeth Williamson  · 8 Mar 2022  · 574pp  · 148,233 words

Clinton campaign code words denoting child sex trafficking. In this imaginary lexicon, “cheese pizza,” for example, meant child pornography. Pizzagate is the direct predecessor of QAnon, the false worldview that several years later caught fire among some Americans. Both delusions rest on a pastiche of ancient tropes. Secret satanic meetings, the

…

ravaging, selling, and killing of innocents by bloodthirsty elites—Pizzagate and QAnon contained elements of blood libel, the hateful, centuries-old falsehood that Jews murder Christian children as part of religious rituals. Days before the November 8

…

sentenced to four years in federal prison.[11] Burning along the same social media fuse, and sparking on new platforms, Pizzagate begat QAnon, a new, more virulent mass delusion. QAnon, some of whose adherents see Trump as an avenging hero in a child-trafficking scheme led by Democratic politicians and Hollywood liberals

…

, first appeared on 4chan around 2017, grew steadily, then surged during the coronavirus pandemic. In 2020, Times technology columnist Kevin Roose described lurking[12] in QAnon Facebook groups and watching them “swell to hundreds of thousands of members,” spreading misinformation about the coronavirus along with the claim that Hillary Clinton and

…

liberals drink the blood of children. The FBI began the 2020 election cycle by warning that QAnon posed a potential domestic terror threat. The social media platforms cracked down, but the hoaxers adapted, using hashtags like #SaveTheChildren as camouflage. In August 2021

…

, a forty-year-old QAnon believer shot his ten-month-old daughter and two-year-old son in their chests with a spearfishing gun. He told investigators that by killing

…

them he was saving the world from monsters. QAnon followers have allegedly murdered a New York mafia boss, vandalized a church, and run for office by the score. One, Marjorie Taylor Greene, was elected

…

Sandy Hook a hoax, claims she has since renounced. Will Sommer, now a reporter at the Daily Beast, calls QAnon a “rebranding” of Pizzagate. “It’s fair to peg the Comet arson to QAnon,” he told me. “These kids are walking the same path tread by their Pizzagate forebears, and it all

…

fifteen years, including three restaurants and a nonprofit art gallery called Transformer. Alefantis and I were speaking in the wake of a new crackdown on QAnon by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. For the first time since 2016, he could go a day or two without any threatening messages. Still, every few

…

we refute that theory?’ ” Uscinski said. “When really what’s going on is that it’s just a visible manifestation of the underlying worldview.” Even QAnon, typically described as a mass delusion afflicting the far right, transcends politics, Uscinski told me. “In our models, partisanship and ideology drop out as predictive

…

of QAnon beliefs,” he said. “So what we’re left with are dark personality traits.” These traits are led by what psychologists call the “Dark Triad”: narcissism

…

-e9fc93160703_story.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11 Kevin Roose, “Following Falsehoods: A Reporter’s Approach on QAnon,” New York Times, October 3, 2020, Times Insider, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/03/insider/qanon-reporter.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12 Associated Press, “Fox News, Family of Slain DNC Staffer Seth

…

Times, October 2, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/02/us/politics/john-eastman-trump-memo.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26 Ben Sasse, “QAnon Is Destroying the GOP from Within,” The Atlantic, January 16, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/conspiracy-theories-will-doom-republican-party

…

–65; and conspiracy theories, 241, 258; and Infowars’ interview with Trump, 213–14, 215; and Jones, 243, 429; and Pizzagate, 240–41, 242–43; and QAnon, 250–51; and Wikileaks’ email dump, 241–42, 253 CNN, 16–17, 96, 98, 118–20 Cohn, James, 221 college professors as conspiracy theorists, 104

…

, 370, 375; as news source, 258; and Pizzagate, 243, 250; and Pozners’ open letter to Zuckerberg, 343–45; Pozner’s trusted status with, 421; and QAnon, 250–51, 252; Sandy Hook Hoax Facebook group, 148–50, 153–60, 163–64, 166–69, 170, 226, 328, 392, 440; Sandy Hook Truth Facebook

…

Kelly, 338–40, 389 Pieczenik, Steve, 104–5 Pinto, Jack, 65 Pizzagate, 240–56; and Infowars’ video, 243, 249–50, 254–56, 277, 320; and QAnon, 242–43. See also Comet Ping Pong Podesta, John, 241–42 Pomeroy, Frank, 326–27 Potts, Neil, 385, 386, 387, 389 Powell, Joshua L., 88

…

, 47 PrisonPlanet website, 91, 113 Proud Boys, 260, 426, 432 Pulse nightclub massacre (2016), 93, 440 Purfield, Kevin, 236–38, 337–38, 388, 440 Q QAnon, 242–43, 250–51, 419 Quarles & Brady, 401 R Ragle, Dennis, 258–59 Randazza, Marc, 346–47, 350, 428 Read, Max, 100 The Real Deal

…

, 165, 286; Infowars deplatformed from, 374–75, 377; lack of regulation/standards, 193–95, 209; as news source, 385; and Pizzagate, 243, 250, 253; and QAnon, 250–51, 252; reluctance to remove abusive content, 194, 239, 375–77; and Section 230 protections, 422; and Senate panel, 382–90. See also specific

…

, 420; and First Amendment protections, 206; and Infowars’ Chobani coverage, 279, 280; Infowars removed from, 374; and Pizzagate, 243; and Pozner, 164, 165, 421; and QAnon, 252; and Section 230 protections, 207; and Trump, 213 U United Way, 51–54, 231–34 “Unraveling Sandy Hook in Two, Three, Four, and Five

…

, 290, 297, 306; Infowars’ videos/channels, 118, 120, 199, 258, 277, 297, 345, 365; Pozner’s trusted status with, 421; Pozner threatened on, 169; and QAnon, 252; and Section 230 protections, 207 Z Zaretsky, Staci, 101–2 Zarrella, John, 112 Zero Hedge, 295–96 Zimmerman, Genevieve, 401, 402, 405 Zimmerman, Jake

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