While accounts of her death vary, the prevailing view is of a terrible irony. As the mob surged around the Capitol building steps, she was trampled to death while clutching a “Do Not Tread on Me” flag – the yellow ensign bearing a coiled rattlesnake favoured by ultranationalists, the hard right and QAnon cultists.
Her family had urged her not to attend. But Boyland was adamant. She told them she would stand to one side, away from the throng, out of harm’s way.
Boyland had her fair share of personal travails. She had suffered from substance addictions and had racked up a long list of convictions for drug-related offences. But she had been clean for three years. In that vulnerable state, she had veered into the QAnon cult.
Roseanne Boyland was ripe for the cult’s picking: vulnerable, susceptible, gullible.
The cult of QAnon believes that the deep state engages in industrial scale child sex trafficking, of the secret existence of tunnels 10 kilometres below the Earth’s surface where children are transported around the world to be sent off to die in satanic rituals or are tortured and drained of adrenochrome.
They believe that Donald Trump is their saviour, a heroic figure who will take on these dark forces and his General Mike Flynn is leading the righteous into battle deep below the Earth’s surface.
From the outside, the QAnon cult seems bizarre, incredible, entirely implausible. But those on the inside believe its propaganda lies as if they were gospel, clinging to every word, every ‘drop’ from ‘Q’, sometimes referred to darkly as ‘Number 17’, a supposed deep state insider who knew all the state’s secrets.
The question is who is responsible for QAnon? It needs to be answered because these people bear a moral responsibility for Boyland’s death. They bear a moral responsibility at least in part for the vicious hyper-partisanship that burns deep in American society. They bear a moral responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of families who have suffered dislocation, of empty seats at the dinner table, of sons and daughters lost to the cult.
What we do know is QAnon is not a coincidence, not an accident, not a joke or an online hoax that has somehow spiralled out of control.
To understand at a basic level how QAnon finds appeal, we might look at the extreme weirdness of groups like Flat Earthers whose laughable belief system stems from a pre-Copernican view not just of the planet we live on but the solar system and the universe. They’re often perceived as harmless whackos. Some time ago this might have been true, but it is no longer the case now.
If a person believes the sun and the moon orbit around a flat disc and that ‘Thar Be Dragons’ exists on the corners of world maps, then they become receptive to other forms of suggestion and to online manipulation. In this way Flat Earthers became infiltrated by neo-Nazi groups online and now many Flat Earthers believe not only that our spherical planet is a slab floating in the space-time continuum but also that the world is controlled by a cabal of Zionist bankers.
That is a simple A to B exercise in propaganda distribution facilitated by the arcane and clubbish way in which that small group operates. Flat earthers are a small target easily identified by their activity and preyed upon in bulletin board internet sites.
QAnon’s architects reached deeper into demographics and sectors that previously had no political affiliation. Many members of the wellness community, a bunch of organic food gnawing hippies usually of the Left and sometimes from the extremes of it, became immersed in QAnon. It should be no surprise. As a group they tend to view accepted knowledge and science with cynicism and reject mainstream media. Just a few years ago, wellness influencers were content with publishing odd recipes and advocating steel cut oats. Now they publish Nazi tropes, anti-vax disinformation, 5G conspiracies and more recently that the COVID-19 pandemic is a deep state fabrication.
But there is more to QAnon than the mere susceptibility of its adherents. QAnon is large and amorphous with an estimated three million followers. The estimate comes from Facebook analysis. But QAnon is not Facebook friendly, certainly not now where almost all of it has been deplatformed.
There is emerging evidence that QAnon was designed as a psychological operation and specifically targeted at an audience that was open to its monstrous lies with a view to creating a base of Trump supporters so rusted on, so vehement that they would not only vote for their man in droves but would fight to keep Trump in the White House.
There is no evidence that Trump was involved in the creation or perpetuation of QAnon. We don’t want to replace one conspiracy theory with another. But in seeking to establish motive, it is clear that those who perpetrated the cult of QAnon did so perceiving some benefit from a Trump presidency and two terms at that.
QAnon was elaborately contrived, drip feeding its adherents just enough information for them to add their own takes and theories. It is a propagandist’s sharpest tool – not just to spread disinformation but to have it reinterpreted and reshaped by its readers to add to its persuasive power.
It first saw light of day back in 2016 where Q was then known as FBIAnon and peddled on platforms like 4Chan. Promptly banned from there, it shuffled off to 8Chan, later to become 8kun. These are spaces in the net where there are no rules, no curation, no moderation.
It began with Pizzagate and wild and disgraceful allegations surrounding the murder of Democrat operative, Seth Rich. It was promoted by alt-media firebrands like Alex Jones who told his audience during the presidential election campaign of 2016, “When I think about all the children that Hillary Clinton has murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear.”
In its infancy, QAnon propaganda mirrored that of the Trump campaign. Hillary was an evil deep statist who should be behind bars.
I doubt that it changed the result of the 2016 election. American voters were in the mood for change. If it was designed to bolster Trump’s re-election chances, it has failed. But what it did was create a dangerous and burgeoning cult that saw millions lost in it and drove American democracy further to the brink.
It is an evil business and with Trump now gone, how QAnon was established and by whom needs to be investigated comprehensively. We owe it to the memory of people like Rosanne Boyland whose life was ended by it and the millions of others left bereft by it. We need to understand how a small number of people pushing Q propaganda can strike such a blow to America’s democratic institutions. Those involved in its planning and delivery need to be brought to account.
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Roseanne Boyland was a 34-year-old woman who made her way to Washington DC on 6 January from her home in Kennesaw, Georgia. Kennesaw is a suburb in Cobb County, part of the Atlanta Metro area whose support for Biden in the November 3 presidential election helped flip the state from deep red to a pale shade of blue.