A mind-infecting virus: the dark dreams of QAnon

In November 2020, a few hours after the US presidential election had been called for Joe Biden, Virginia Thomas, wife of Clarence Thomas, justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, sent a bizarre text to Donald Trump’s chief of staff, her old friend Mark Meadows. It read: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days & will be living in barges off GITMO [Guantánamo Bay] to face military tribunals for sedition”.

Thomas’s fantasy had not originated in her own head. It had been generated online by some part of what we must now call the “QAnon community” — a sprawling nebulous matrix of individuals who adhere to a compendious almost rococo conspiracy theory. This theory holds that since 2017 an anonymous security insider — Q — has been revealing via gnomic hints the existence of a vast global conspiracy involving the Clintons, the Bidens and just about anyone else that for some reason they don’t like.

In addition to secretly ruling the world these bad people also run a vast network of trafficking of children for sex, necessitating a labyrinth of subterranean tunnels in which these infants are stored. Q however has revealed that inside the US military and secret service there is an angelic squad of resisters, led by Trump, who are poised to rise up, arrest, try and execute the wicked ones and usher in a better new world. This is “the coming storm” and the faithful need “to trust the plan” — even when the storm seems always to be delayed.

That any large number of adults should sign up for such a prospectus seems remarkable. That some Americans might be prepared to use violence and kill and be killed in its name seems terrifying.

QAnon supporters were a significant presence during the January 6, 2022 storming of the Capitol in Washington. By then an open espouser of QAnon fantasies, Marjorie Taylor Greene — famous for having suggested that Rothschild-inspired “space lasers” were responsible for Californian wildfires — had been elected to Congress for a Georgia district. In the 2022 midterms more than 50 QAnon Republicans stood for various state and national positions.

Conspiracy theories are nothing new — at times of major change or upheaval they tend to flourish. But this one has dangerous peculiarities all of its own. The question of how it came into being and where it is going is tackled in two books, one by a British and one by an American journalist. James Ball is a tech-savvy writer who worked with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks before it became a Moscow data dump. In The Other Pandemic, he tells the reader how an essentially adolescent male online culture of the early 2000s morphed into the Hydra-headed conspiracy theories of the 2020s. He knows because for a while he was part of it, participating in the 4chan messageboard site set up in 2003 by an American teenager. “The early years of 4chan lined up nicely with my late teens and early twenties”, writes Ball, “and it was in all honesty just a ridiculously fun place to hang out.” Early users of Twitter may recall a similar feeling.

But unregulated boys will be bad boys and what developed was a kind of online Lord of the Flies. From online pranking, including “doxing” (tracking down and publicising the addresses of victims) to sending unwanted pizza deliveries, some escalated to threats of violence and rape and to “SWATting”, which, explains Ball, involved “tricking a police SWAT squad into storming a target’s home, a ‘prank’ that has led to multiple fatalities.”

In 2014 an online campaign of harassment by male gamers known as Gamergate began, aimed at what they saw as a feminist establishment moving into censor their games. This, writes, Ball, “fed into a nascent right-wing movement — the alt-right — which in turn fed into QAnon.” He quotes the academic Angela Nagle description of how “a leaderless anonymous online culture ended up becoming characterised by a particularly dark preoccupation with thwarted or failed white Western masculinity as a grand metaphor.”

But QAnon, though it certainly encompasses this metaphor, is much wider. Ball likens it to a virus, moving almost uncontrollably through our new neural internet networks, infecting minds. Observing it at work has been Will Sommer. The US journalist was an early bird on to the QAnon scene after it first fully emerged in late 2017 with the earliest “Q drop” — in which the anonymous Q began to reveal his prophecy. Since then Sommer has tracked QAnon and its adherents both online and off — not an entirely safe thing to do.

In Trust the Plan he summarises QAnon as “a dark dream about sanctioned violence against political and cultural enemies”. But it’s a consequential dream, argues Sommer, since it helps lay the ground for authoritarian forces to take power in America.

Although the movement has a “god-emperor” in the shape of Trump, it has no leader. Though the original Q has been tracked down to the home of a US expat called Ron Watkins living in Manila, it now doesn’t seem much to matter who he is. In hundreds and even thousands of online communities and message boards and on social media, the QAnon brand makes and remakes itself. All kinds of people seem to be attracted to the QAnon prospectus, including older people and a significant number of women.

Part of QAnon’s plasticity and appeal is down to its ecumenical nature. Sommer and Ball describe how its peculiar ideology was formed by a merger of conspiracist themes which in the past would have been separate. Back in the day no JFK assassination theorist worth their salt would have taken up with a New World Order global conspiracy believer. One was broadly left and the other was very much on the right. Not any more.

And while a global conspiracy to take over the world is not a novel idea, one which does a mighty sideline in sexually abusing children (as opposed to merely undermining the morals of the world) certainly is. Sommer instances a woman UK student who came to believe a QAnon claim that the actor Tom Hanks has kept his youthful looks through ingesting a substance called adrenochrome, procured from the bodies of infants. Those familiar with the history of Christian antisemitism will recognise here a descendant of the “blood libel”, the widespread belief that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood for arcane purposes.

In the same way, the paranoid idea of conspiracies to poison us are also not new. Anti-fluoride campaigners have been on that trail for decades. But Covid gave the genre a new and significant twist. With people stuck at home during the pandemic with nothing but their computers for company, the scene was set for a perfect syncretic storm in which, writes Sommer, “Facebook’s QAnon groups turned into radicalization swap meets where antivaccine activists could trade extreme ideas with militia members and flat-earthers”.

With no charismatic guru in charge QAnon has developed a kind of laissez faire cultism, leaving a lot of room for grifters seeking to make money or to enjoy a little bit of status. Sommer describes a QAnon event in Dallas in 2021 that he attended (before being recognised and marched out), where the big draw was QAnon’s favourite celebrity, Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The event included an auction. “With a giant inflatable Trump balloon looming behind him,” writes Sommer, “Flynn held up a QAnon quilt for sale. He auctioned off a T-shirt with his name on it for $575. A baseball bat signed by Flynn sold for $7,000 . . . But the biggest draws were a series of digitally edited posters that reimagined Flynn, [Sidney] Powell and other QAnon luminaries as tricorne-hat-wearing Revolutionary War heroes. A poster of Flynn toting a flintlock musket sold for $7,000.”

This sounds funny. But the loss of family members to QAnon obsession doesn’t, and nor does the violence. What was purely online has, as the storming of the Capitol proved, found its way on to the real streets and beyond. Sommer tells us that by September 2021 some 101 QAnon followers had committed crimes in furtherance of their beliefs, adding that “No other conspiracy theory, from 9/11 trutherism to birtherism, gets even close to inspiring that level of violence.”

So what should be done about it? The Harvard-based philosopher Lee McIntyre, author of several books about disinformation and the scientific method, has written a short prescriptive polemic to address exactly this point. The subject of On Disinformation is not QAnon as such but the related phenomenon of “denialism”. The two are linked for the obvious reason that denying the realities of man-made climate change, Covid-19 or the Biden election are essential if you are to posit a conspiracy by the deep state or the Clintons to foist these “false” ideas on an accepting, sheeplike citizenry.

McIntyre is slightly more robust than either Ball or Sommer (who both fall back on the unevidenced idea that rank-and-file QAnonites are victims of social and economic malaise) on the need to combat bad thinking. He is also no fan of Barack Obama’s famous dictum that the antidote to bad speech is good speech. Like Ball and Sommer he attacks the algorithmic sins of the social-media giants and notes that, for example, 65 per cent of the anti-vax propaganda put out on Twitter (or X as we must now call it) was down to 12 individuals and 111 people were responsible for half of the anti-vaxx disinformation on Facebook.

In addition to policing such material off their platforms, says McIntyre, their monetising algorithms should also be opened up for academic scrutiny. On the more positive side he recommends a revival of the “kitemark” idea, in which tech companies tweak their algorithms to send people back up the rabbit hole by linking them to good sites which provide reliable information. Such internet Reithianism sounds fine and dandy until you say the words “Elon Musk” and imagine what his kitemarks would be. Personally though, having thought about this a lot, I have no better idea to offer.

The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball, Bloomsbury, 288 pages, £20 

Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Reshaped the World by Will Sommer, Fourth Estate, 272 pages, £20

On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy by Lee McIntyre, MIT Press, £13.99, 144 pages