QAnon Can’t Be the Scapegoat for This

The Pennsylvania man accused of decapitating his father undoubtedly spent time in dark places on the internet. That became abundantly clear when news broke that the man, 32-year-old Justin Mohn, had been arrested after holding up a severed head in a YouTube video and calling for the execution of federal government employees, starting with his own father. In his ramblings, Mohn called on “patriots and militia members” to win their country back from “the globalist, communist takeover of America.”

It’s hard to get to the point of making manifestos on YouTube (let alone broadcasting lethal violence online) without some exposure to certain extreme digital spaces. So it’s easy to see how certain right-wing tabloids jumped to some conclusions in their coverage of this disturbing crime. “QAnon Believer Accused of Beheading Federal Worker Dad Smirks in New Mugshot,” a New York Post headline stated. The U.S. version of the Mirror similarly proclaimed him to be a QAnon adherent, as did the Daily Mail.

The problem is that there’s no evidence Mohn had any connection to QAnon. No reporters have dug up any mention in Mohn’s digital footprint of the group’s trademarks, like “the storm” (Donald Trump’s supposed great coming triumph over a vast pedophilic cabal) or Democrats committing child sacrifices. He used violent right-wing rhetoric, yes. But we can’t ascribe his beliefs to QAnon.

It might sound pedantic to split hairs about the conspiracy theories that drive extremists like Mohn to do despicable things. But as several experts in the world of online extremism told me, making that distinction is important beyond just understanding Mohn’s crime. It’s crucial to grasping and confronting the more expansive problem of political and social extremism in American society today.

To put it another way, it’s tempting to believe that right-wing conspiracy theorists don’t deserve our nuance, that their wackiness shouldn’t demand that we spend any of our precious time on this earth reading up on adrenochrome or frazzledrip. But experts say that labeling everything that reeks of right-wing brain rot as QAnon-affiliated risks obscuring just how much extreme right-wing rhetoric is now coming from much more mainstream sources—including politicians themselves.

QAnon “is perceived as a collection of outrageous bullshit beliefs backed by nonsense,” said Al Jones, the pseudonym for the founder of the Q Origins project, which examines QAnon culture from its earliest days to now. “People see these as fundamentally silly and unserious beliefs and worldviews. They see a Q believer as a yokel or uninformed idiot.”

If you mark any kind of right-wing violence that stems from conspiratorial belief as “QAnon,” Jones said, you risk misunderstanding mainstream right-wing rhetoric as fringe.

Mohn, in the YouTube video, complained about the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and the Black Lives Matter movement. These groups, he said, were working with the federal government (“the deep state”) to allow a “globalist, communist takeover” of the country. His conclusion isn’t a rational one, but it’s also not as fantastical as QAnon’s satanic cabals; his violent act reeked of other, more basic forms of hatred-based conspiracy theories with broader appeal.

“Oftentimes with these violent actors, they just pick and choose from different ideologies and form franken-beliefs—some people call it ‘salad bar extremism,’ ” said Alex Mendela, an associate analyst for Alethea, a company that detects and mitigates mis- and disinformation.* “But by saying anyone in this soup of conspiracy theories is QAnon, you’re distorting the threat.”

Also, QAnon transformed the political landscape in the U.S., but it doesn’t have the cohesion and power it once did.

“The main accomplishment of QAnon was it got ‘the elites are sacrificing children’ codified as a big, mainstream idea on the conspiratorial right,” Jones said. “That’s firmly in there now.” But there hasn’t been a Q drop (the cryptic messages from the eponymous Q) in well over a year. And now—years into a Biden presidency in which the promises of the coming “storm” of mass arrests of Trump’s enemies failed to materialize—QAnon has been bleeding followers. “The movement has lost a lot of steam,” Jones said.

Strangely, it’s QAnon’s very success that may have made it less relevant. The ideas Q promoted in the movement’s heyday—of the powerful deep state, of the stolen election, of rampant child trafficking—have themselves become standard Republican beliefs, even if the more bizarre details haven’t succeeded beyond the core QAnon community.

“In some ways, the Q people got everyone on their team and didn’t need the trappings of QAnon anymore,” Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theory expert and the author of Jewish Space Lasers, wrote in an email.

As the movement itself lost power, followers defected, and others were drawn to other channels for their disaffection. Michael Senters, a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech who researches the language and rhetoric of the far right online, argued that just as much as QAnon, anyone seeking to fight online extremism needs to monitor communities formed around anti-vaccine activism, Christian nationalism, and incel-style misogyny, among other issues.

“We can’t address why people get into the far right, we can’t stop these pipelines from closing, unless we understand the various reasons people get into it,” he said.

Mohn, the Pennsylvania man who beheaded his father, seemed to be influenced by some of the ideas behind the Great Replacement theory, a white nationalist conspiracy theory that argues that political elites are trying to displace white Americans—or at least alter the country’s political and cultural fabric—by increasing the number of immigrants and people of color in the country. And Great Replacement theory language has seeped into mainstream Republican talking points, showing up in the recent GOP primary debates, for example. (One version of the argument, perhaps most prominently promoted (repeatedly) by Tucker Carlson on his former top-rated Fox News show, posits that Democrats are trying to make white Americans a minority to get more votes.) When Trump told a crowd in December that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” that echoed Nazi terminology of the kind that fueled the Great Replacement theory.

“The violent far right lets it be known they’re the biggest supporters of the Republican Party, and the Republican Party rewards that loyalty by speaking their language,” Senters said.

In an environment in which the language of previously fringe beliefs is bleeding into the mainstream, it can be daunting to try to parse the coded extremist language now intermingling with political speech by popular and influential national politicians and media figures. So maybe that’s what happened with the New York Post and Daily Mail reports about Mohn.

Still, some extremism experts saw a more cynical maneuver. By labeling right-wing extremist violence a result of believing in QAnon, they said, the Post and the other right-wing tabloids were protecting the more conventional nativist ideas the publications often echo and help spread and that showed up in Mohn’s diatribes—in a sense, downplaying the culpability of the right-wing media and echo chamber.

“Some outlets in the U.S. might have a vested interest in trying to relegate that violence [to QAnon] because they might fall in line with those conspiracy theories that motivate violence,” Mendela said, “like the Great Replacement.”

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” Rothschild said in his email. “Their readers don’t want to think this guy is someone like them, they want him to be one of those​ people who think lizards run the world and Hillary Clinton eats babies at dinner with JFK Jr. And the reality is that the Pennsylvania killer’s belief system wasn’t that far off the beaten path from many other right-wing media consumers.”