I had my first encounter with a QAnon follower this week, thankfully online, and came away somewhat disturbed, but also surprisingly optimistic.
My family on my dad’s side is composed of 100% “conservative” fundamentalists, and every last one seems to have been sucked into the Trumpist cult. But it was only recently that I discovered my cousin’s wife sharing the names of celebrity pedophiles from Ghislaine Maxwell’s “recently unsealed list”. (Spoiler alert: there is no such list) I was shocked to see the lunacy I’d only known from public reporting out in the wild, and within my family’s sphere of contacts. It was frightening to realize that the ranks of those unreachable by reason now included people in my own family.
But during our discussion, I did notice something positive. Potentially very positive. As my cousin’s wife asked me crazy leading questions, all the while bobbing and weaving around the mistakes and holes I was finding in her arguments, I realized nobody was joining in from her side to support her positions or even like her comments. Looking at her other recent activity on Facebook, she had likes on plenty of posts, but not so much on the crazy QAnon ones, or even the QAnon-adjacent ones. And this is from a community largely consisting of Oklahoman Trump voters. Were her Trump-voting comrades perhaps embarrassed?
I clicked some of her crazy links and became more acquainted with QAnon claims (apparently RBG visited Epstein’s island?!) and found it simply inexplicable. But my feeling of optimism came from the fact that I also saw massive crossover with other conspiracy theories. Anti-vaxxers are all over this stuff. And QAnon is all over the anti-vax stuff. It didn’t take a lot of clicks before I wasn’t even reading about the core QAnon conspiracy, but rather (of course!) Hillary’s email server.
Whatever malevolent 4chan pranksters were originally behind QAnon, it’s largely in the hands of the crazies now, and I don’t think the number of crazy people is really growing. QAnon seems to be getting bigger via mergers and acquisitions. The people falling for it were already lost to some other conspiratorial belief. And QAnon may be doing us the favor of bringing them largely under one roof where they can embarrass and discredit each other merely by association. The chain linking “George Soros is paying protesters” to “Tom Hanks eats babies” is getting shorter by the day.
From the Medium article:
I think the conspiracies themselves, freed of the constricting need to offer even bad evidence or a slightly plausible theory, have merged into a single all-encompassing philosophy of life. The Q people have absorbed their competitors like the Borg. Their motto is “Where we go one, we go all”, and indeed, the believers in lizard people, the 9/11 truthers, the anti-vaxxers — they’re all meeting at the same place now.
As Donald Trump slyly boosts QAnon and congressional candidates openly tout their affection for the movement, they are tying their fate to a movement even less (far less) popular than they already are. This is a good thing. QAnon must of course be fought. But every mockery, every debunking, every piece of snark directed it at causes welcome collateral damage to other components of the vast Trumpist Borg. Resistance is not futile.
