Remember QAnon?
"If your party has a faction of people who believe Democrats eat children and worship Satan, that makes it a lot easier for people to buy that Democrats stole the election."
Updated at 7:40 p.m. ET on December 10, 2021
There’s a new PDF making the rounds of the internet called “Election fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN.” It’s basically a “how to coup” PowerPoint presentation, and while its provenance can’t be confirmed, it includes a lot of the talking points you’ve heard Donald Trump surrogates use. But it also includes wild diagrams of various paranoid fantasies that the Trump administration used to shop the Big Lie—for example, the idea that China has some nefarious connection to our voting machines. Many of these look like something right out of Trumpworld’s favorite conspiracy theory, QAnon.
It’s been a year since QAnon—which postulates the wacky fantasy that Donald Trump is the savior of humanity secretly working behind the scenes to stop a cabal of child-eating Democrats—went silent. Q hit the mainstream in 2017 via “dumps” posted by a “Q Clearance Patriot” (an anonymous account claiming Q-level security clearance) on the infamous message board 4chan. There are various anti-Semitic tropes also thrown into the mix, but ultimately, QAnon is a kind of hodgepodge of many baseless conspiracy theories, recentered on the premise that Donald J. Trump, former reality-television host, will save humanity.
When I first started reading about QAnon, I found it, like the idea of Trump as president, too silly to be true. A lot of Democrats thought Trump running would be a “good thing”—that he’d be easier to beat because of his complete and utter lack of political knowledge and his blistering racism and stupidity. I remember many a night when my husband told me that there was no way that guy with the implanted wig would be president. This conventional wisdom held until November 8, 2016.
QAnon benefited from this same “too stupid to succeed” maxim. Fast-forward to May 2021, when the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core found, according to The New York Times, “that 15 percent of Americans say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, a core belief of QAnon supporters.”
What QAnon did—and perhaps this was just by accident—was prime the GOP base to just generally accept crazy stuff. Or maybe the GOP has been primed for this for decades. “The political paranoiac can’t stomach society as it is and thus seeks to destroy it under the guise of some looming threat: a deep state, antifa, migrant caravans, transgender bathrooms, an international pedophile ring,” Bennett Parten recently wrote in a Los Angeles Review of Books piece about mid-century intellectual Richard Hofstadter. “Perceived persecution runs deep, and those taken with the paranoid style channel their victimhood by believing the world is one vast conspiracy. But here is the key idea: it is not just personal grievance. The paranoid style is the paranoid style because it manages to take victimhood and transmit those feelings of personal injury onto the nation’s fate. One person’s paranoia thus becomes an attack on a culture or a way of life, turning a lone loony into a proud member of a ‘silent majority’—a collective firewall against something that needs no firewall.” Hofstadter, whose thinking “gives us a place to start” contextualizing today’s political conspiracies, wrote “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in 1964.
I asked Will Sommer if he saw a connection between QAnon and the Big Lie. Will is a QAnon expert who writes for the Daily Beast about conspiracy theories and has a book about QAnon, called Trust the Plan, coming in 2022 from HarperCollins. “Besides all of the QAnon believers involved in trying to overthrow the election on January 6, QAnon helped inject conspiracism into the GOP,” Sommer told me. “If your party has a faction of people who believe Democrats eat children and worship Satan, that makes it a lot easier for people to buy that Democrats stole the election.”
Joe Ondrak, the head of Logically, a company that tracks disinformation, draws a straight line from QAnon to the Big Lie. He told me that “Trump loyalists and the Trump campaign were eager to seed uncertainty around the legitimacy and security of different voting methods early on, [and] a particularly conspiratorial slant to that rhetoric was present from the [start]. The Big Lie is built upon a belief in the sprawling all-powerful ‘deep state’ infrastructure ... an entire voting machine company, ‘server farms in Germany,’ and the involvement of AntiFa ‘agents’ all controlled and coordinated by the ‘Democrat Party’ or something more sinister above them (China, Soros, etc).”
“It is safe to say that while not everyone who believes in the Big Lie is a QAnon follower,” Ondrak continued, “all QAnon followers believe in the Big Lie.”
It’s not clear to me how our country can put these kinds of ideas back in Pandora’s box. There’s a temptation to dismiss things like this as silly, too crazy to be believed, but as Trump himself shows, you dismiss these kinds of things at your own peril—and democracy’s, too. JFK Jr. will not return from the dead to run as Trump’s VP, but Trump doesn’t need him as a running mate to win in 2024.
This post has been updated to reflect that Q clearance is an actual security designation within the U.S. government.