Life gets really interesting when you start getting conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theoreticians.
As someone who grew up under the influence of Illuminatus, I am acutely conscious of both conspiracy and the use of fnords. Fnords, you will recall (or not) are the trigger words which are embedded in our subconscious and we are programmed to forget until they are activated by the people who implanted them in the first place. To ‘see the fnords’ leads to an attempt to read between the lines. For followers of Donald Trump one fnord is the number 17, as is the letter Q.
You may, or may not, have noticed the increasing numbers of Trump supporters who are wearing t-shirts with a large Q printed on them. They are there in the background when you get news shots of his rallies. That Q pops up on shirts and signs and banners. “We are Q” read one sign in Florida. Another read “Where we go one, we go all” (another fnord.) Following that rally in Florida one reporter asked White House press secretary Sarah Sanders if Trump “encouraged the support of rally-goers wearing ‘Q’ shirts”. She didn’t answer.
The appearance of the fnords is a result of the rise of the Q-Anon phenomenon which has resulted in thousands of Trump followers attempting to read between the lines, with potentially disastrous results.
The start of this can be precisely dated. On 28 October 2017, someone calling themselves Q began posting a series of cryptic messages on the 4chan internet forum. Initially these were targeted against Hillary Clinton.
Q claimed to be someone high up in the US Government with ‘Q’ clearance which gave him or her access to classified information. They claimed that they had been instructed to deliberately leak intelligence information online “in order to covertly inform the public about the President of the United State’s master plan to stage a countercoup against members of the deep state”.
While there was no way of verifying Q’s statements (Q remaining stubbornly anonymous), or if they were ‘real’ (both the statements and the person), lots of people believed it.
Those believers started to refer to Q Anonymous, then Q-Anon. They called themselves ‘The Bakers’ because they were follow Q’s breadcrumb trail of ‘clues’. Their conclusion was that what Q was telling them was that the US government has been secretly investigating Democrats and the Justice Department will soon reveal compromising information about Hillary Clinton and that the shambolic approach displayed by Trump is really just a cover for someone who is actually a hyper-competent superhero.
The small, obscure website quickly became the go-to site for Trump supporters. It had thousands of hits, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. Earlier this year Time Magazine included Q as one of the top twenty five most influential people on the internet. Apple sanctioned a Q-Anon app on its Store. The app had a huge number of downloads. It ended up in the top ten most downloaded apps before Apple removed it following investigations on what was being posted. If you go on YouTube you can watch more than 130,000, mostly unedifying, videos of Q-Anon content. Back in March Reddit banned its users discussing Q-Anon because they were “encouraging or inciting violence and posting personal and confidential information.”
In other words, the thing snowballed. Looked at objectively, it appears that Q, whoever he or she was, was overtaken by a multitude of other people, also acting anonymously, posting their own crackpot conspiracy theories and calling themselves Q. It is no longer possible to say who is Q and who isn’t.
In no particular order, in addition to Q’s original theory that there is a secret conspiracy by an alleged deep state against U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters, we have had Trump feigning collusion with the Russians in order to enlist Robert Mueller to join him in preventing a coup d’état by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and George Soros; numerous liberal Hollywood actors, politicians, and high-ranking officials engaging in an international child sex trafficking ring; the North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un is a puppet ruler installed by the CIA; German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the granddaughter of Adolf Hitler; the Rothschild family are the leaders of a satanic cult; Princess Diana was killed because she found out about 9/11 “beforehand” and had “tried to stop it.”; John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death and is secretly a Trump supporter (though everything he does is secret since he’s secretly alive). Now, he’s Q, or one of the people who is Q, or working with Q.
One of the most plausible conspiracy theories is that put forward by BuzzFeed that Q-Anon is a prank being pulled on Trump supporters by a bunch of leftists. The impetus for this is a 1999 Italian novel called ‘Q’ written by Luther Blissett. Now, Luther Blissett doesn’t exist. It’s the name used by a network of leftists and anarchists in the ’90s. The plot of ‘Q’ is weirdly similar to the conspiracy that Q is peddling online, and that is driving speculation that Q’s claims are just an attempt to make the right look completely unhinged.
There are also endless theories on who Q is. The most popular theory among the Bakers is that Q is someone within Trump’s administration, or even Trump himself. Another theory is that Q is in fact “a shadowy military intelligence figure who recruited Trump for the presidency”. According to this theory a group of generals approached Trump about launching a coup against Obama. They then reconsidered after recruiting Trump to run for president with a mission to execute his own coup against the deep state. They agreed that if he would run, they would conduct the coup d’etat as a legitimate process, rooting out the traitors within the government. (That feeds into the belief that Trump is battling a cabal of anti-American saboteurs who have taken over government, industry, media and various other institutions of public life.) Drain the swamp. (another fnord.)
The villains in the swamp are the rich and the elite. The people who already have all the money and influence. One person interviewed at one Trump rally was quoted as believing “He’s saying all these things about how they lead, how they, these rich people using their money to kind of, like, manipulate the masses.” And that is true: Billionaires have been building and consolidating power and political influence for decades, but they do it for much more mundane goals like rolling back corporate taxes in order to protect their wealth.
People would rather believe that there are evil masterminds out there that pull strings on cataclysmic events than accept that life is generally a sequence of random events over which we have no control. Conspiracy theories aren’t created by evidence, but by belief, or by the desire to believe that there must be something more to the events that shape our lives, culture, and politics than accident or happenstance. We turn to conspiracy theories to provide a sense of order in that chaos. Conspiracy theories attempt to make sense of events that don’t make sense. Researchers have found that fact-based arguments against them only serve to reinforce them in the minds of believers. That’s what makes Q-Anon or any other conspiracy theory so difficult to combat: Because conspiracy theories aren’t based on facts, conspiracy theorists aren’t receptive to them either. On multiple occasions, when people have dismissed Q’s false claims and incorrect predictions as wilful misinformation, others have responded by claiming that “disinformation is necessary.”
In the case of Trump’s followers, his campaign was run on exploiting Middle America’s insecurities. As a candidate, he played on the paranoia of Americans who thought the country they knew was being taken away from them. They didn’t stop feeling insecure when Trump won. There was too much dissent, too much doubt cast on his (and, by extension, their) legitimacy. Then Q came along and offered real hope: Everything is fine, Trump has everything under control, and everyone who stands in his way will soon be sent to prison. Literally. There’s something psychologically comforting about the whole idea and they latched on to it.
Nor must we set aside the fact that we have increasingly become a gaming culture. Part of the Q-Anon appeal lies in its game-like quality. Followers wait for clues left by Q on the message board. When the clues appear, believers compare the riddle-like posts to Trump’s speeches and tweets and news articles in an effort to validate the main narrative that Trump is winning the war against the evil swamp. Dozens of commentators dissect Q’s posts on message boards, in YouTube videos and on their personal web pages. The shared rush to interpret clues from a drop of information from Q resembles something close to what video gamers call an MMO, or massive multiplayer online game. Literally thousands of people accepted that when Alabama’s football team presented Trump with a jersey with the number 17, it was coded signalling of Qs influence. (17 is the letter Q’s placement in the alphabet).
Unfortunately what started as a nutcase idea on an obscure website hasn’t stayed there. Q-Anon hasn’t manifested only in T-shirted rally goers wielding signs. Their paranoid worldview has crossed over from the internet into the real world. On more than one occasion, people believed to be followers of Q-Anon have shown up with weapons in places that Q told them were somehow connected to anti-Trump conspiracies. A suspicious and possibly armed man showed up at the law offices of Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels, after Q posted a link to Avenatti’s website and a picture of the office building. In June Matthew Wright was arrested on terrorism and other charges for driving an armoured vehicle, and blocking traffic for 90 minutes. He said he was on a mission involving Q-Anon to demand that the Justice Department release a report on the conduct of FBI agents during the investigation into Hillary Clinton. He had been motivated by a Q post which claimed the report had been heavily modified.
You can see where this is leading. Think back to the Presidential campaign when false online posts claimed that Hillary Clinton was running a human trafficking ring out of a pizza restaurant (Ping Pong Pizzas) in Washington. Ping Pong received hundreds of threats from people who believed the posts. On December 4 Edgar Welch walked into the restaurant with an AR-15 rifle and opened fire. He later told police he had read online that the restaurant was harbouring child sex slaves. He refused to dismiss the conspiracy theory, and rejected the description of it as “fake news”. Three days later a second man attempted the same thing. He said that he did it to “save the kids” and “finish what the other guy didn’t.”
It’s not too difficult to see Q-Anon leading to similar, if not more disastrous outcomes. Or is that me just being paranoid. Or am I part of a conspiracy? Join the Q.
Howff Tae Hip Hop 