QAnon: the dark web conspiracy cult backed by Georgia’s GOP candidate

As the Democrats begin to rediscover the appeal of a moderate, centrist ticket, one of the prevailing narratives surrounding a potential Trump loss in November is that the Republican party will also find a path towards its old normality. Rid of the cuckoo in their nest, Republicans would learn to nurture traditional conservative values such as moral decency, fiscal responsibility, and a strong foreign policy towards the old enemies. Or so the theory goes.

On Tuesday, Republicans chose Marjorie Taylor Greene to fight Georgia’s 14th congressional district in November’s election. It is a reminder of a quite different narrative in which the Republican party embraces an extreme even more perverse than Trumpism. Greene is an advocate of a extremism called “QAnon” and, if you’re not aware of the QAnon movement, take a moment to congratulate yourself. Then decide if you really want to learn more.

QAnon is a product of its origins. It began on the notorious internet forum known as 4Chan, a site that takes anonymity and consequence-free behaviour to the most extreme level. Forget what you hear about the internet’s Wild West. 4Chan is the living embodiment of libertarian anarchy; a descent into the various abysses of human psychology.

Want to invest in a cryptocurrency that rises in value every time somebody dies of coronavirus? That’s CoronaCoin, developed by 4chan users. Want to see My Little Pony fanart with a Nazi vibe or download children’s TV that randomly cuts to porn? There will be a 4Chan forum for “anon” like you. When the Christchurch mosque gunman, Brenton Tarrant, wanted to explain his actions to the world in a six-page letter filled with hate, it was unsurprising when it turned up on 4Chan. It is the place where the Dark Web bubbles into the visible world; where content straddles the boundary between the merely grotesque and the downright illegal.

It is also home to political activists, especially those on the hard right. Back in 2017, one “anon” known as “Q” – hence the movement’s name “QAnon” – began to post on the board claiming to have information from within (or at least with good knowledge about) the Trump administration. Greene has called “Q” a “patriot” who is “worth listening to and paying attention to […] because many of the things he has given clues about and talked about on 4chan and other forums have really proven to be true.”

What “true” amounts to is yet unclear. The Q posts have all the ambiguity of modern-day religious prophecy. The first promised the extradition of Hillary Clinton followed by “massive riots organised in defiance and others fleeing the US.” The language is filled with acronyms, conveying the sense that this is authentically insider talk. “Passport approved to be flagged effective 10/30 @ 12:01am,” it read. “US M’s will conduct the operation while NG activated. Proof check: Locate a NG member and ask if activated for duty 10/30 across most major cities.”

It proved groundless. Of course it did, though it’s a sign of our sad times that this had to be said. But it was only the beginning of the madness. Even repeating QAnon nonsense gives it more respectability than it deserves wastes your valuable time. Yet QAnon shouldn’t be ignored as simple internet conspiracy under a new faddishly appealing name and logo. It is that, but it is also something significantly more dangerous.

These stories have real-world consequences, such as the notorious Pizzagate episode, when Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old man from North Carolina, drove to Washington DC to storm the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant and “rescue” the children being “held” there as part of a huge “paedophile ring” run by Hillary Clinton. Nearly every word in that sentence needed inverted commas. None of it (of course) was true, yet Welch isn’t the villain here. Who wouldn’t want to storm a pizza restaurant if you thought children were being held there as part of a Satanic sex ring? But that is the power of QAnon, which provides so much of the gaslight darkly illuminating our culture.

Yet what makes QAnon particularly dangerous at this moment in time is how so many of their theories originate with the most powerful man in the world; how Donald Trump’s rambling nonsense turns into a kind of perverse logic once it’s been developed in the Q-sphere. “Maybe it’s the calm before the storm,” said Trump in 2017. When asked what storm, he replied: “You’ll find out.”

To regular Trump watchers, this example is typical of a president who rarely thinks before he speaks. Journalists regularly ignore these slips in language, thought, or knowledge, yet “the Storm is here” has now become a rallying cry for the movement, and just six days ago, another candidate for the GOP – this time for John Lewis’s old seat – tweeted it out after Trump had retweeted her (twice).

Another notable example was how few headlines were made when Trump recently claimed the Lebanon explosion was a bomb. It was factored into the news coverage that this American president might not be the best informed about one of the world most dangerous hotspots.

In the Q community, however, the new mythos is continually being written, constructed from the ambiguities presented by this president. As for the Lebanon bomb, in the Q-sphere: “the Beirut bombing today was directly next to the Lebanon Central Bank, which is also owned by the most evil deep state family, the Rothschilds. There are no coincidences.”

Q has become insidious in right-wing culture and throughout that portion of the Republican base who believe in Trumpism (and far worse). Nor is it limited to the grassroots. It is embraced by figures such as Michael Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor, who last month posted a video of himself taking an oath that ended with “Where we go one, we go all!”, another QAnon slogan. Ed Mullins, the head of the New York Police Department’s second-largest union, recently appeared on Fox News with a QAnon mug prominently displayed behind him.

On OAN, now the President’s favourite channel, a report sympathetic to Q claimed that “the deep state is fighting back” after Twitter banned accounts linked to the movement. “The media and Democrats are slamming the President for enforcing the law,” they said, “and it appears important that the other side is silenced. […] But a growing number of Americans might be doing their own research as reports also say QAnon is becoming a widely accepted system of beliefs, the new mainstream.”

It’s hard to convey the brazenness of this kind of coverage. Words such as “lies” and “corruption” are constantly cut to footage of Trump’s opponents, while the language slips effortlessly between facts and opinion. The report notes how the media “refer to Q as a dangerous conspiracy cult that just happens to support law enforcement”. Notice the leap? The first bit is true; the second bit shameless editorialising.

This, really, is the culmination of what has happened over the past twenty years in US media. Fox began it with the “Fair and balanced” tagline which never conveyed the reality of deepening partisanship. It’s now not just commonplace. It is the daily working practice at the White House where Donald Trump overlooks established journalists at his daily press conferences and keeps picking out Chanel Rion of OAN, who herself has spoken positively about the movement. “Q is Q anonymous for a reason, for a very good reason,” she has said, “and I think that people need to respect that”.

The victory of Marjorie Taylor Greene on Wednesday heralds the inevitable spread of Q into America’s legislature. Though she has yet to fight the election, the district is hugely Republican, and she is almost certain to claim her seat in November. Trump, meanwhile, has congratulated her, calling her a “future Republican Star” and “strong on everything and never gives up – a real WINNER!”

This “future star”, this “real WINNER”, peddles “truths” straight from the QAnon subculture: she has described Muslims elected to Congress as “an Islamic invasion into our government” and called George Soros “the Nazi” who is “trying to continue what was not finished”. Speaking yesterday after her victory, she said of Nancy Pelosi that “she’s a hypocrite. She’s anti-American. And we’re going to kick that bitch out of Congress.”

Even if this is unlikely to be the “new mainstream”, Q will not disappear in November should Trump lose the election. Expect it, instead, to factor into the conversation that Republicans will have about the future of their party in a nation whose demographics get less friendly towards them with each passing year.

If he wins, however, then there’s no saying how far the Q malignancy could spread.