Americans watched in horror on Wednesday as delusional right-wing insurrectionists loyal to Donald Trump and the myth of white supremacy marauded through the halls of the Capitol and live-streamed their neo-Confederate Neanderthal prostrations from the floor of the House. The general public was shocked by what they watched and confused by images of stormtrooper cosplayers and that cheap Halloween costume Viking pounding their chests as the Capitol police largely allowed them to desecrate the place and walk out untouched.
But for those who monitor the dark corners of the internet, what happened on live TV and across streaming platforms was not at all a surprise — the reprobate conspiracy theorists and grinning chimp insurrectionists were largely familiar faces, carrying out a coup attempt that had been organized out in the open over social media (including on the Twitter feeds of Donald Trump and other Republicans). It wasn’t even really surprising to them that some of the people who were supposed to protect the Capitol worked to incite and assist the rioters. (There were a whole lot of off-duty cops and Republican legislators involved in the insurrection.)
Now, Americans who did their best to ignore their lunatic red-pilled family members’ conspiracy theories and rants on Facebook are being forced to figure out what to make of QAnon and other online extremist movements and how they wound up changing the course of the country’s history.
I spoke with Travis View, the widely cited expert who co-hosts the QAnon Anonymous podcast, to get the lowdown on Q and these other digitally-congregating fringe fascists and to understand how they got so powerful, how this attack happened, and where it all goes from here.
It seems like there are people like her, Boomers who get sucked into QAnon on Facebook, and then nihilist young shitposters. How do you break them down?
When I first started researching QAnon, I assumed it was an older white Boomer thing. But as I started attending these QAnon rallies and I started to see the crowd, it actually wound up being surprisingly diverse, both in terms of age and ethnicity. The one core thing that sort of binds a lot of the QAnon followers is just total institutional distrust.
There’s this belief that all government and all academia and all media and all of Hollywood are irredeemably corrupt and unimaginably depraved. And they believe the only way that you can truly understand what's going on is not through researching the world through conventional media sources, but rather by doing your own research, and this lens becomes like a high-powered confirmation bias. They share the kind of narratives that sound more appealing and positive and exciting to them.
When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound like a far leap from the stuff that has been preached by right-wing media for decades, on Fox News and conservative radio shows back into the ‘80s and ‘90s. The Rush Limbaughs of the world led to Alex Jones. You can see the link in Clinton conspiracy theories. Do you think decades of that stuff really greased the skids or primed the pump for QAnon?
Oh of course. The Clinton Body Count conspiracy theories were very popular in the mid-’90s, and if you sincerely believe that the Clintons are responsible for dozens of murderers in their pursuit of power, then it becomes perfectly rational that you would want them to be locked up, that you would be just absolutely outraged. Then it’s seen as an injustice that these people are murderers and depraved and yet they're still walking free.
Some of the far-right commentators, when they spread those sorts of things, their motive was simply to direct messages of distrust and hatred towards the Clintons. But the base didn't know they weren't supposed to take it literally. They swallowed that whole, and in that environment, it becomes quite rational in their own tiny world that it is a profound injustice that Hillary Clinton wasn't locked up or executed.
And now they have their own “news” networks like Newsmax and OANN, which legitimize them, right? How does that work?
A QAnon conspiracy theory will be born on 8kun and then it will be spread on Twitter, then it will be picked up by OANN. And then Trump will see it on OANN and he'll repeat a version of it, which is like a confirmation to everyone else who's consuming all those other kinds of media. It’s a self-sealing network that creates an alternate reality for the people who participate.
For people who spout this stuff on those right-wing channels, who speak at events, who make a good living off this stuff — do you think they actually believe it or have just found a nice, profitable scam?
This is often the question — are they just a grifter or are they a true believer? And I feel like a lot of times, it is not as clear cut of a question as it seems. Sometimes they are genuinely a true-believer, but they simultaneously have a talent for monetizing their deranged beliefs.
Like a Jim Watkins, who owns 8kun, where Q is based, seems like both a supreme scumbag and also a grifter.
Exactly, he seems very savvy. I think there is this idea that there are grifters on one side and the true believers on a different side, and if you are crafty and savvy enough to monetize these QAnon narratives, then that means you are crafty and savvy enough to know that they're false. But that's not necessarily true.
I spoke to one major QAnon promoter named In The Matrix at a conference in Arizona. Before, I kind of assumed that he was a grifter and he was just cynically pushing these theories. But when I spoke to him, the way he very passionately rattled off these QAnon decodes, it struck me that oh man, this guy really believes this. He also happens to be monetizing it, but he really believes it.
So how many Q followers do you think have been infected on Facebook and could potentially be deprogrammed?
I often get asked, how do I talk to someone who has fallen down the QAnon rabbit hole? And it depends on how it happened. If someone has been following QAnon from the beginning and they've spent like five or six hours [a day] online researching as part of the community, and all their friends are in the QAnon community and their sense of purpose and life is now tied to the QAnon community, that kind of person is just not going to be possible [to deprogram]. You're asking them to become a different person in the core of their soul in order to let go of this theory, which no one could do very easily.
But someone that's a more casual follower and they sincerely believe it, but is not a big part of their identity — maybe they have other things going on in their life, like career or family — then that kind of person might possibly dislodge from the belief.
I think one of the issues is that the government often is filled with terrible people, doing terrible things, on behalf of even more terrible people. Corporations, too. So to some people, at least at first blush, hearing these QAnon theories, while they’re absurd and horrid, might not sound like such a big leap if you’re predisposed to certain ways of thinking.
This is a concept that Steve Bannon, when he was talking about QAnon, he called it “directionally correct.” Which is this concept that’s like, the specific claims and conspiracy theories that they're coming out of QAnon community are obviously nonsense and false, but the general gist of what it’s trying to communicate has some merit. Baseless conspiracy theories usually involve this incredibly powerful cabal of people who work behind the scenes to engineer history. A lot of times this is false, but a lot of times, it’s true.
The history of the world is really a sort of series of conspiracies amongst powerful people who decide what they're going to do with their resources and power. So it's very important to draw a distinction between the fact that just because lizard people don't really rule the world, that doesn't mean that the CIA never killed people or staged foreign interventions or MK-Ultra, or these other awful things.
Look at the Jeffrey Epstein saga: He was a horrible sex trafficker and pedophile who was protected by government prosecutors and had so many deep connections with the most powerful people in the world. That makes it tempting to believe the QAnon stuff, I’m sure.
Epstein is a really great example. Because there are two things we know: There was this outrageous abuse involving extremely powerful people and that the media really failed to uncover it — there was a Vanity Fair story that was killed.
What winds up happening is they come up with these theories about Epstein that build on top of it to the point that it doesn't closely reflect reality. One example is that QAnon followers will accuse a woman named Rachel Chandler, who is currently the owner of a casting agency in New York, of being involved in the Epstein trafficking ring. Now, there's no basis to this, there's no evidence of it. Julie K. Brown, the investigative reporter who has done more to expose Epstein than anyone, calls it a nonsense internet conspiracy theory.
So they take on something that's already really awful and really signals a high degree of corruption and a high degree of confidence that we don't have the full story of who was involved in the corruption or how bad how deep it goes. And they just like to latch to on obvious falsehoods and nonsense and extra baggage that emanates from the true core of it.
So now that so many QAnon accounts have been taken off Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and Parler has been removed from Google Play and Apple’s App Store, do you think that will stop the spread? I’d imagine not having it so readily available has to help, and I’m 100% for banning them, but do you think it could radicalize people, too?
When QAnon first got going, there was an immediate push to get these kinds of theories onto mainstream social media platforms. A week after the first Q drops, the first week of November 2017, there was a deliberate campaign to get them on YouTube, Twitter, and other mainstream social networks, because they knew that these networks are so powerful and they’re more accessible than the difficult-to-use chan sites. So as consequence, this broad-scale ban really hurts the QAnon community.
The less tech-savvy ones, they're either not going to be willing to go to 8kun, for example, which is an ugly and difficult-to-use website, or maybe they'll just not be willing to go to Parler because it has so many problems with Apple and Google Play. By simply increasing the barrier to entry on these things, it is going to definitely hurt.
Now, what’s going to happen, and I think this is going to be instrumental in seeing how the QAnon community evolves in the future, is that they will get pushed to more extreme social media networks. For example, Marc-Andre Argentino has been tracking the growth of The Great Awakening group on Gab. He says it’s grown by 40,000 members since the Twitter purge of QAnon followers and that's dangerous because on Gab, QAnon followers, who are in rapture to this mystical kind of fascism will wind posting right next to classic white supremacists. And that might further radicalize them, might make them even more militant.
This is an excerpt from today’s edition of Progressives Everywhere, a progressive political newsletter I run that has raised over $5.8 million for progressive Democratic candidates and causes since 2017. I interview candidates, organizers, experts, and other leading progressives, while also providing insight on state and local races (here was my pre-insurrection, pre-Georgia election preview of 2021 policy in the states). I’ll have a big interview with a right-wing extremism expert on Sunday. You can subscribe to the newsletter here!