Aftermath of A Coup: The Threat Lives On

As Donald Trump’s failed coup recedes slowly in time, Republicans are working furiously to bury it much faster. But they can’t, for the simple reason that Trump is still there — not in the White House, not even on Twitter, but looming everywhere they might think to look, like an ancient, sinister eldritch, otherworldly terror from a combined product of William Randolph Hearst and H.P. Lovecraft. And he has the tentacles to prove it: his easily riled-up fan base. 

How Trump’s impeachment trial will play out is anybody’s guess, there are simply too many variables. A huge factor standing in the way of it resembling justice is the lingering impact of the QAnon conspiracy cult. It may be severely shaken by having suffered the ultimate disconfirmation of its central prophecy — “The Storm” in which Trump vanquishes all his enemies. 

“Trump did not declare martial law in his final minutes in office; nor did he reveal a secret plan to remain in power forever,” NPR’s Camila Domonoske noted. “President [Joe] Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were not sent to Guantánamo Bay. The military did not rise up and arrest Democratic leaders en masse.”

But the storm had repeatedly failed to occur before when it should, only for new interpretations to appear. So that could still conceivably happen once again. More likely, something similar, but new (perhaps modeled more on how it worked than what it argued) will emerge to take up where it has faltered. Because, make no mistake, QAnon not only played a vital role in Trump’s failed coup, it’s still helping to keep Trump’s hold on the GOP intact. One of its earliest boosters — newly elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — has emerged as the embodiment of Trumpism’s spreading stranglehold on the party.

Two Classic Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories

At its core, QAnon is a combination of two classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, slightly reformulated for the post-modern age: The oldest is the medieval blood libel, the false claim that Jews kidnap and murder Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes — primarily as an ingredient in the baking of Passover matzah (unleavened bread). The earliest such ritual murder charge took place in Norwich, England, in the 12 century, two centuries before similar sorts of charges ignited witch hunts across the European continent. The second is Protocol of the Elders of Zion: the claim that a small coterie of Jews is secretly controlling the fate of nations, if not the world.

QAnon — first hatched on a neo-Nazi infested message board — combines elements of both conspiracy theories. It alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring (recycling the earlier discredited “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory) and plotting against U.S. President Donald Trump, who is allegedly fighting the cabal. The very first QAnon post implicitly claimed Trump was secretly working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the exact opposite of Mueller’s openly stated purpose.

An earlier post claimed “Hillary Clinton will be arrested between 7:45 AM – 8:30 AM EST On Monday – the morning of Oct. 30, 2017,” to which Q responded. “HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run…. Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur.” 

What actually happened on Oct. 30 was the exact opposite of what Q claimed. Mueller’s initial indictments against Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort and Manafort’s former business partner, Rick Gates. Yet, QAnon continued to promise that Mueller was working with Trump. This was the first in a seemingly endless pattern of discredited claims reinterpreted after the fact.

As indicated above, a key element of the theory is that Trump is planning a day of reckoning known as “Storm,” when thousands of members of the cabal will supposedly be arrested. That first post was the first glimpse of what the Storm promised to be. The vast majority of QAnon believers conflated the Jan. 6 insurrection with the Storm, and, of course, Trump leaving office puts the Storm beyond the realm of possibility.

QAnon as “gaming’s evil twin. A game that plays people.” 

But it’s long been understood that cults can survive the disproof of central beliefs, and can actually grow stronger, by creatively reinterpreting events. Although unlikely for QAnon, something remarkably similar in spirit is very likely to emerge in some form. To understand why, we need to view QAnon as seen by the alternate reality game — sometimes called ARG — community, several members of which have described QAnon as intentionally creating an alternate reality, just as alternate reality games do.

The most chilling of these analyses, A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon by Reed Berkowitz, described QAnon as “gaming’s evil twin. A game that plays people.” 

“It is the differences that shed the light on how QAnon works and many of them are hard to see if you’re not involved in game development,” he went on to say. “QAnon is like the reflection of a game in a mirror, it looks just like one, but it is inverted.”

Take for example apophenia, “the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas).”

“In most ARG-like games apophenia is the plague of designers and players, sometimes leading participants to wander further and further away from the plot,” Berkowitz explained.

 But QAnon thrives on just such wandering.

“In real games there are actual solutions to actual puzzles and a real plot created by the designers. It’s easy to get off track because there is a track,” he explained. 

QAnon is a mirror reflection of this dynamic. Here apophenia is the point of everything. There are no scripted plots. There are no puzzles to solve created by game designers. There are no solutions.

QAnon grows on the wild misinterpretation of random data, presented in a suggestive fashion in a milieu designed to help the users come to the intended misunderstanding. …

There is no reality here. No actual solution in the real world. Instead, this is a breadcrumb trail AWAY from reality.

The “reality” that people think they are finding is actually one they’re creating. But it’s one they’re creating around an identifiably core of “almost pure propaganda,” that’s deeply manipulative.

“That IS the sole purpose of this. It’s not advertising a product, it’s not for fun, and it’s not an art project,” Berkowitz writes. “There is no doubt about the political nature of the propaganda either. From ancient tropes about Jews and Democrats eating babies (blood-libel re-booted) to anti-science hysteria, this is all the solid reliable stuff of authoritarianism. This is the internet’s re-purposing of hatred’s oldest hits.”

QQAnon’s Origins: 

It’s no surprise that this should be so. As explained in a Twitter thread by The Q Origins Project, the pol/sub-board of 4Chan, where Q first posted, from Oct. 28 through Dec. 1, 2017, “always had a large, racist, Nazi-friendly contingent before, during, and after Q’s time,” as well as a culture of hoaxes, with multiple other pretend insiders like Q. But it wasn’t just the board in general. It was even more specific: “many of the key ideas in the Q mythos were present in this very thread before Q started posting. … [F]ar from breaking new ground, Q gave his audience what they already wanted. ”

Things changed, however:

But by the time Q left 4chan at the end of November ’17, the composition of the board had changed — many boomers had been brought onto the boards by YouTuber tracybeanz, who can fairly be described as the first QAnon influencer.

So by late November, there were frequent skirmishes between Nazis and Q believers (and, interestingly enough, arguments among the Nazis: was Q bad because he wasn’t overtly antisemitic, or good because many Q believers were coming to 4chan and getting “pilled” on Nazism?).

Which is why QAnon is crucial in supporting Trumpism: It provides a common language for promoting hard-core white supremacists ideas, whether those promoting them fully realize it or not. And that’s what Trump’s takeover of the GOP is based upon.

A Co-Created Fictional Reality

Berkowitz goes on to make a series of illuminating key points. First, that Q is a fictional character:

QAnon uses the oldest trope of all mystery fiction. A mysterious stranger shows up and drops a strange clue leading to long-hidden secrets which his clues, and your detecting power, can reveal.

Someone with real earth-shattering information would not tease people like this. They’d release it the way Edward Snowden or the anonymous source behind the Panama Papers did — no spotlight on the messenger, no hints or mystery, just overwhelming mountains of evidence. 

“Real people in the government with important information to disseminate deliver it as fast as possible usually all in one go,” Berkowitz wrote. “They don’t make you solve things. They try to be as specific as possible.” 

Q is NOT a whistleblower. Q is a “plot device”. Q is fictional and acts exactly like a fictional character acts. This is because the purpose of Q is not to divulge actual information, but to create fiction.

That fiction is much more convincing, if the audience co-creates it themselves, which is the actual reason behind the fictional one that “Q wants you to ‘do your own research’ and come to your own conclusions.”   

Berkowitz further notes that “Strongly held beliefs are literally a part of us,” which is why challenging them with facts — no matter how well documented — is generally not just useless, but counter-productive: “attacks on core beliefs are treated very much as attacks on us, even as strongly as a physical attack.” Thus, by setting things up so that people co-create their beliefs, “If we ‘create’ the ideas in our own minds, they become fused much more intently into our personality. They’re OURS.”

And that is what the fictional Q does with their “breadcrumbs,” cryptic hints that aren’t facts, but questions: “Puzzles and clues for the ‘investigators’ to uncover.” One reason for this is the “Eureka Effect.”

 “Puzzles and knowledge gained through our own efforts are incredibly rewarding and also come with a hit of dopamine, the brain’s pleasure drug, as a reward,” he explained.

Another reason is to feed distrust of existing experts and information sources. “Do your own research” means “Don’t trust other people. Don’t trust institutions. Listen to me.” 

“Solving puzzles together is a great way to form community and to join community,” Berkowitz explained. “ARGs are famous for this. Everyone has something to focus on, a shared interest, and something to do.”

With this combination of incentives and consequences in place, QAnon followers “can continue the game for themselves with very few cues. The game is everywhere.” And, indeed, QAnon has proved remarkably adept at cannibalizing other conspiracy theories and conspiracist obsessions — a trick that has proven particularly helpful when social media platforms have belatedly tried to push back against it.

It’s NOT A Conspiracy

While Berkowitz convincingly explained how QAnon functions as “gaming’s evil twin, A game that plays people,” that doesn’t necessarily mean it was created as such. Assuming that it would take us in the direction of turning this descriptive account into just another conspiracy theory, with powerful shadowy figures pulling history’s strings.

We do know that Q is a fictional character — a recent study of character patterns shows that the original 4Chan posts came from one author, while later posts, which continued on 8Chan, come from another one. But the rest of what Berkowitz describes cannot be firmly nailed down as to how much intentionality was involved, much less how much coordination. After all, there were other Anons before QAnon, and much of what Q did was simply copying them, which makes it impossible to determine how deeply he understood what he was doing, much less what commitments he had. There were also at least three main individuals responsible for dramatically boosting Q from obscurity, as NBC reporters Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins first described in August 2018: a YouTube video creator and two moderators of 4Chan.

So, rather than see QAnon as some carefully crafted creation masterminded by sophisticated puppet masters, we should be open-minded as to how it originated and evolved, how much intentionality and coordination there was at different points, etc. Paradoxically, if it were the creation of a sophisticated small cabal, that would probably be relatively comforting. Trump’s departure from office and the failure of the Storm to arrive have dealt quite a blow to QAnon, putting any such cabal in a difficult spot.

But the more unintentional and uncoordinated QAnon’s origin and evolution were, the more easily we could see it evolve, replicated in a functional way, not necessarily with any of the same specific elements. As long as the ingredients Berkowitz describes and the online social environment in which they played out are with us, either QAnon — in some mutated form — or its replicants, or both, will continue to provide a fictional alternative reality which at least roughly a third of all Americans seem happy enough to live in.