On August 7, 2020 President Donald Trump spoke to American people. “We’re going to win,” he said. “And we’re going to win big. Q just watch. We have the cards – they don’t.”
The ‘Q’ was almost certainly a mispronunciation, but millions of QAnon observers latched on to it. Trump was their man. Trump was their saviour. Anons believed President Trump had set himself to war against the Deep State and with their help, he would triumph.
Q: Into the Storm is an HBO six-part documentary currently screening in Australia on Foxtel. It is the first serious attempt to get to the bottom of the QAnon cult and determine the real identity of the deep state “insider” known as Q.
Three years in the making, Director Cullen Hoback and executive producer Adam McKay traversed the globe investigating the movement fuelled by conspiracy theories and revealed how the Q drops war gamed the internet, hijacked politics, and manipulated people’s thinking.
The documentary is also a study on freedom of speech. QAnon itself is an exercise in speech without consequence, of deliberate use of dangerous misinformation designed to inspire violence.
The great cult of the 20th Century, Scientology, was based on the charismatic manner and style of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, his books and his cultist toys like the e-meter. It drew people in due to a mistrust of psychology and peddled easy answers to complex personal and societal problems through old technology and communication methods.
QAnon is a 21st Century phenomenon. It could only have happened in this time, driven by social media and imageboard websites like 4 Chan and 8 Chan/kun.
The preconditions of its success are grounded in a profound sense of disconnection from the political process and a deep mistrust of mainstream media.
Ironically, the darkest claims of QAnon fall in the historical, founded on the bizarre belief that the world is run by Satan-worshipping paedophiles who eat babies. The baby eaters are Democrat politicians, Hollywood liberals, even Pope Francis I.
The slaughter and cannibalism of infants is an age old propaganda ploy, used widely to inspire anti-Semitic pogroms for centuries.
Interestingly, the GOP congressman from Florida, Matt Gaetz, who is facing allegations of sex trafficking and possibly trafficking of a minor for the purposes of prostitution, has found support from QAnon cultists who have posted recently on Telegram declaring Gaetz has been set up.
Unlike most cults before it, QAnon is political rather than religious or spiritual in nature.
QAnon is more than a conspiracy theory. It’s the mother of all conspiracy theories. At one level, it’s an online game that encourages adherents to play their own role in a revolution which will solve the evils of the world.
We don’t yet know who Q is, but his messages called Q drops are largely based on repetition, a useful tactic in psy-ops. There have been more than 5000 Q drops, almost all cryptic in meaning while emphasising a key set of phrases – “Do your own research”, “Trust the Plan”, “Where We Go One, We Go All,” and predicting Apocalyptic scenarios like “The Storm” and “The Great Awakening”.
Q drops are then analysed by influencers and turned into memes where they filter through the social media before ending up on grandma’s Facebook page.
In 2018, the cult of QAnon came to the belief that sealed indictments had led to the arrest of 55,000 people, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Tom Hanks, Bill Gates. In 2020, the Australian branch of QAnon were shrieking that Victorian Premier, Dan Andrews had been arrested and was cooling his heels in Guantanamo Bay and had been replaced by a body double.
None of this happened, of course, but it didn’t diminish the fervour.
Why is it dangerous? QAnon is a cult and cults practice exclusion – members of the cult are separated from their friends and families. QAnons are ‘redpilled’ – a term first used in the film, the Matrix where the Keanu Reeves character, Neo, takes a red pill in order to find a hidden reality.
Like all cults, it separates followers from their money who splurge on donations and merchandise to Q-influencers.
QAnon’s most dangerous element is that it encourages its adherents to take matters into their own hands. In its early days and in its earliest expression, a Washington DC family restaurant, Comet Pizza, became the scene of a siege when one Anon entered the restaurant with an AR-15 seeking to rescue abducted children kept in the basement. There were no abducted children. There was no basement.
A swat team circled the building, arresting the gunman, Edgar Maddison Welch, a 29-year-old resident of Salisbury, North Carolina. No one was injured although patrons fled the building terrified. Welch, who has just completed a four year jail sentence, offered no apologies, claiming only that his shocking assault was a case of “bad intel”.
The storming of the Capitol building on January 6 was not exclusively a QAnon event, but it had been promised by Q and Q-influencers for years. It wasn’t just the Q Shaman, Jake Angeli, who turned up. Thousands of Anons pushed their way into the Capitol Building, clashed with police and threatened the very heart of American democracy.
Intriguingly, Q Posts have stopped. There hasn’t been one since December 20, 2020, a typically cryptic message but this one attempted to put an end to the dangerous nonsense.
It hasn’t worked. Anons are now off the leash, free to make all sorts of torturous predictions. There was a flurry of activity online when the Ever Given became blocked in the Suez Canal. Part of the container ship’s registration included the initials “HRC” – Hillary Rodham Clinton. The ship is operated by Taiwanese transport company, Evergreen Marine. Evergreen was Hillary Clinton’s secret service ascribed codename.
Anons started chirping that abducted children are being transported around the world by container ship. QAnon has now become a danger to shipping.
Who was Q? You’ll have to watch the documentary to find out but the name of Ron Watkins, the administrator of the message board 8kun, the conspiratorial movement’s online home, looms large.
But there are so many questions still to be answered. Was this a political psy-op designed to create a hard base of Trump voters or was it a crazy game that spun out of control and led millions of people around the world to fall under its spell? And who should pay the price for entrapping millions of people into a violent fantasy, giving them a sense of connection and enhanced identity by propelling them into battle, the foot soldiers in a contrived fight against evil?
More Coverage
The Dubai side trip everyone should experience
A landmark desert lodging on the outskirts of Dubai is reborn as a luxe oasis with polished villas, world-class restaurants and spirited activities like camel-trekking.
Hippy icon footwear, or work of art?
The German firm Birkenstock that was founded in 1774 makes footwear for the stars, and hopes to create a legal definition of sandals that will deter copycats.