The cult of Q? How QAnon is rallying Trump supporters and frightening experts in extremism

PHOENIX—Outside the Maricopa County Elections Centre, the crowd was stirring.

A young man in a MAGA hat nudged his friend, grabbed his cellphone and stood on the tips of his toes to see if his eyes could confirm the whispers. A mom holding a baby in one hand and a Trump flag in the other ran ahead of the crowd of 200 or so, her phone camera high. Big men carrying handguns on their hips and rifles across their chests circled the outer orbits of the crowd, serving as de facto security guards on this evening in Arizona.

Some shouted, others exclaimed to no one in particular.

“Oh my God, it’s Alex Jones!”

As each member of the crowd jockeyed for position, some reached out, almost with reverence, to touch America’s most famous conspiracy theorist.

Bellowing into a megaphone, Jones held them all rapt.

“We don’t know how this is going to end, but if they want to fight, they better believe we are going to fight,” he shouted in his characteristic gruff voice. “And we will win.”

Jones told the crowd that Joe Biden was a member of a globalist “deep state” criminal cabal allied with China, and that only they, as “true patriots,” could save the country by uniting behind Donald Trump.

In response, the crowd chanted in unison, “1776.”

It’s a reference to the American Revolution. A war cry demanding action for what they believe in.

Except what they believe is not true.

The scene in Maricopa County — the beating heart of pro-Donald Trump protests in southwestern America following the recent election — tells us something about what is happening in the top echelons of Trumpist furor in the United States, and perhaps most crucially, what is continuing to happen among the substantial minority of people who refuse to accept that Joe Biden has won the presidency.

Certainly not all those who voted for Trump believe in these conspiracy theories.

Those who do, however, view it as their patriotic responsibility to support the president — even as he falsely claims to have won.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll of American adults found 21 per cent of respondents did not believe Biden had won on Nov. 10, three days after the election was called.

Underlying that resistance for a surprising number of Americans is the mysterious character of Q, an anonymous internet poster or posters, claiming to have access to classified government information.

Since 2017, QAnon posts have appeared on the online forums 4chan and 8kun, painting an unfounded and dramatic picture of the Democratic party and American “deep state” as the orchestrators of a criminal pedophilic cabal, which Trump is cast as quietly dismantling. It extends to Canada too — the Washington Post on Friday reported Canadian QAnon boards falsely claiming Justin Trudeau was planning “millitary intervention on American soil” in response to Trump’s refusal to concede the presidential election.

Belief in QAnon’s core conspiracy theory is substantial, with polls and surveys suggesting six per cent of American voters are convinced. The influence of theories related to Q is likely even greater than that, with figures such as Alex Jones amplifying certain aspects of the Q conspiracy, such as the existence of a corrupt, even criminal deep state of which president-elect Biden is falsely said to be a part.

QAnon belief has appeared to veer into the realm of violence, with some high-profile attackers and prospective attackers across North America having some association with the Q conspiracy theory. In one much-publicized incident in Arizona in 2018, a man pleaded guilty to a terrorism charge after blocking a bridge with an armoured vehicle.

Though there is an apparent contradiction in freedom-loving, self-proclaimed patriots denying the result of an American election, to some the logic has been set out for them by sources they came by in ways that initially seemed innocuous, and always reinforced some beliefs they already held.

These are not people who view themselves as deviant or defiant opposers of the truth. It was in pursuing some truth, in fact, that their beliefs became enmeshed with the conspiracy theories that they in turn have come to parrot.

It’s the same way (although amplified by the internet) that extremists and cult followers have been recruited for decades. And it’s not a sign of the weak — experts say no one is immune.

“It is nothing new,” says Lorne Dawson, a top expert in the sociology of religion and radicalization at the University of Waterloo. “It’s the same stuff around cults and radicalization and conspiracy theories, but there’s this qualitative shift in going to the online world.

“You’re in a bubble on the internet more so than ever before.”

Debra Aiello, on the day the election was called for Biden, showed up to Maricopa County in a QAnon T-shirt and professed herself sure that the networks would be forced to reverse their reporting that Biden had become the president-elect.

“So what Trump did — I guess you’ve heard about the watermarks on the ballots?” the Scottsdale resident said at a pro-Trump rally Saturday morning. She went on to explain a widespread and false QAnon theory that Trump had watermarked every ballot for the presidential race with a secret substance that would allow him to collect intelligence on the outcome of the election.

“He knew about two seconds after the polls closed he won. He knows who won. He’s got all the proof.”

Aiello explained how she got into QAnon. It began for her when a member of an online Christian community she trusted recommended QAnon posts related to God and a false satanic cabal.

She was quickly interested, feeling that she had been let into a special community.

“I went and started reading, and it was like a jigsaw puzzle. And I love to do jigsaw puzzles,” she said.

“So you just take pieces and then people are talking about it. ‘What does this mean, what does this mean?’ It turns out, in retrospect, you see he’s telling us the whole … It’s a movie right? He’s just showing us the whole movie.”

Jake Angeli, a voice actor who was much photographed at the Phoenix demonstrations for his horned warrior attire, and spear affixed with a “Q sent me” sign, made a similar if more impassioned declaration that contained just enough truth to point to a pathway toward allegiance to Q.

Arizona, he said, was a hub of human trafficking. That much is true, and it’s a problem the state governor, Doug Ducey, has committed to combatting.

Reading about human trafficking problems led Angeli into darker, and increasingly less true, theories, including the pedophilic cabal theory of QAnon.

“Everyone that cares about the future and their country should be out here,” he said, referring to a small but spirited crowd he had just energized with a speech about the corruption of the deep state.

“All of it is right there in plain sight. That’s part of these people’s religions: They have to put it out there in plain sight,” he added, meaning that once adherents have learned the truth, it’s part of their Christianity to spread it.

Faith plays a critical role in Marisella Brown’s beliefs, too. She’s not focused on QAnon, but a formative experienced flipped her world view and made her mistrust the mainstream news sources she used to watch and enjoy.

“I used to believe Donald Trump was a racist,” Brown said. “I used to believe that only because I would watch Channel 5 news and ABC, NBC, CBS. They would all say Trump was a racist.”

Brown voted for Obama in 2008, wanting change, she said. Then, before the 2016 presidential election, she had surgery and had to stay home for months. Her habits changed, and instead of watching “Good Morning America” before work, she found herself scrolling through the internet, practically all day.

She was horrified by what she saw on social media sites and forums. What she remembers most are the videos and livestreams of what she said was violence on the streets of France following the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

“I had a meltdown and I didn’t want to go outside because I was being lied to completely,” she said. “After going through it and looking to God, that was it. I slowly started saying: ‘You’ve got this.’ ”

Part of the faith Brown and her husband, Steve, keep now is in eschewing the mainstream news (CIA operatives, as they describe them) in favour of “real people” and “citizen journalists” online.

When Steven Hassan, a Boston-based therapist specializing in helping people exit cults, hears about these experiences and reads about them in the news, he’s hit by a sense of déjà vu — and compassion.

“What cults used to do analog would be to meet the person, find out where they’re from, what’s their religious background, find someone in the group that we thought could relate to that person,” he said.

Hassan knows from personal experience. He was a newly dumped college student in the 1970s when the Unification Church recruited him while he was feeling lonely and vulnerable. A group of attractive women suddenly “love-bombed” him and offered him a community in the church of Sun Myung Moon. Getting out of what he calls a cult two and a half years later has defined his career and his program to help others face reality after what he describes as “mind control” experiences.

What QAnon has shown to Hassan is that process can happen digitally, between internet users, as well as it can in conversations between real-life people.

“You’re having this experience of all these new people telling you how great you are and they will invite you to a gaming platform, singles platform, anti-vaxx, anti-trafficking — whatever it is you’re interested in,” he said. “And so the whole system of recruiting has become digitized.”

It’s scary to him, but so is the way he’s seen people in the media and online respond to those who believe QAnon. He contends that attempts to tackle QAnon’s influence with fact-checking and logical argument miss the point.

“When people try to understand other people, there’s a bias to attribute their personality and what they do to their being, and an underestimation of the social influence on them,” Hassan said. “The big picture is everybody (judges), by default, ‘There’s something wrong with them that they could believe this nonsense.’ ”

But in his personal experience, and in working with clients exiting cults, Hassan said that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Nobody consciously says, ‘I want to be exploited and abused.’ No one.”

He recalled the painstaking process of becoming involved with the “Moonies” — being taken to watch the movie “The Exorcist” and told he risked the health of his own soul if he didn’t follow Moon’s guidance. It took time to break down his liberal, Jewish belief system, to isolate him from his family and friends, to make him stop believing in democracy.

But when he came back to the real world, it happened suddenly. When he learned about mind control in communist China, he couldn’t unsee the similarities with his own experience. Most importantly, he had family and old friends — not arguing with or disputing his opinions, but reminding him of his pre-Moonies self.

That’s the approach he advocates for family and friends looking to pull people out of belief in conspiracy theories. Reach out — not to criticize their beliefs, but to say you miss them. Hassan believes that once people understand they can get social attention and love outside of the confines of the cult community, they are much more likely to take notice of things in the real world that cause their beliefs in false narratives to come crashing down.

“Once you get out of an environment like that,” he said, “all you want is freedom.”

Lorne Dawson of the University of Waterloo has spent his career studying transitions into dangerous dogmatic beliefs — first in the study of cults and more recently in the study of religious extremism, such as “jihadism.”

He describes how people become susceptible to these movements when they experience uncertainty in their own identity, and some manner of social or economic hardship. In the case of jihadists in North America, he said, that often looks like Muslim children of immigrants who struggle to find a sense of belonging and see themselves as not having the same opportunities as, for example, their white Christian peers.

While most persevere through this uncertainty and discomfort, exemplified by the fact that more children of immigrants succeed in school and careers compared to the general population, some seek alternative explanations for their hardships. That minority may turn to radical ideologies that tell them they are part of a select identity that has been persecuted, and that joining a certain group will give them special status or even glory.

“That’s the same kind of thing happening, although now it’s happening to large — huge — numbers of downwardly mobile white working-class people in the United States,” Dawson said. “People want to belong to a group that they think is special. It’s more satisfying to say supernatural forces did this to us.

“It allows them the hope of another supernatural force for goodness that is going to arise and help.”

Dawson said there may be two ways of looking at dismantling the influence of Q and other conspiracy-theory peddlars.

The first would be a major societal shift that allows populations currently vulnerable to the conspiracy theories to feel as though they have a stable base; in other words, for the large group of white people who currently have the feeling of downward mobility to enjoy the benefits of widespread gainful employment.

That seems unlikely to happen in America right now, Dawson said, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. But there’s another way.

“You need to understand there are ways that doubts arise,” he said. “It’s the breakdown in people’s social relationships that precedes any question of ideas. Something that causes them to feel uncomfortable with the other members of the movement.”

There may be a tipping point for believers of QAnon, as there have been for other movements in the past, that make it much more difficult for masses of people to stay aligned with the cause. He calls to mind how violent acts committed by members of online “Incel” communities injured membership in that group, or how the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 temporarily chilled America’s anti-government militia movements, reducing their membership and visibility in society. (They regained momentum and hit another peak in the early 2010s, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

A change in leadership can also be seismic. He said it’s possible that the apparent disappearance of Q — who has not released a post since election day, the same day the administrator of 8kun resigned — could have a major cooling effect.

“From studies of extremism online in general, when a certain opinion leader enter into the conversation, it skyrockets, and as soon as the opinion leader stops talking about it, it dies,” Dawson said.

But with Q an anonymous figure whose theories revolve not the group’s own leadership but that of Donald Trump, it’s not clear to Dawson that the theories will die if Q continues to go dark. The real leader of what he calls this “oppositional movement” in the United States is Trump himself, and he shows no sign of releasing his hold on his most devoted followers.

“Trump is occluded in the sense that he is no longer president. But he’s like some deposed king — they believe he will be reinstalled,” Dawson said.

“In Shia Islam, part of the reason it’s succeeded is that there are great martyred leaders who didn’t actually die,” he said. “(The followers) are waiting for their return to earth.”

Alex McKeen is a Vancouver-based reporter covering transportation and labour for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @alex_mckeen

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