QAnon: The Trumpist Cult of the Absurd
By: Alex Horn, Darshan Stevens
Tags: Pizzagate, Conspiracy Theories, Trump, Q Anon, Cult

The purpose of this article, apart from a general examination of the nature and dangers of QAnon, is not to contest the merits of the various conspiracy theories that have a new venue within the QAnon sphere, but rather to point out the agenda, methodology and circumstance whereby QAnon is coalescing these theories and using them to it’s ends. Those ends being the glorification of Donald J. Trump, the defamation of his detractors and political foes, and his reelection in November, 2020.

It might sound from all this, considering the mass appeal and rapid spread, that QAnon is an elaborately conceived, fiendishly clever propaganda operation. Much like what QAnon and other conspiratorial doctrines like to ascribe to the workings of the “Deep State,” “New World Order,” and “Illuminati” fraternities of tyranny. It is most certainly not that. There is not really even a consistent or cohesive narrative to the QAnon world view, barring a few basic ideas, that all followers will agree on. The saga and story-line of it is largely made up as it goes along by the followers themselves. The success of QAnon is more of a lucky accident for a small coterie of alt-right social media hacks. QAnon has bumbled along into the absurd monster that it has become quite in spite of itself.

QAnon has its roots firmly in Pizzagate, the wildly fanciful misreading of John Podesta’s stolen emails to somehow paint a pizza parlour in Washington DC as the operation headquarters of a pedophile ring run by Hilary Clinton. But what we now call QAnon “officially” began on October 28th, 2017 with a single post on a right-wing message board. The post declared with an air of confident authority and using the language style of a military operation, that Hilary’s passport had been “flagged” such that she couldn’t leave the country to avoid arrest and Federal prosecution, which was foretold to be imminent. An eventuality which would have brought great satisfaction to the “Lock Her Up” contingent of Trump’s fanatical base. But like so many such predictions that were to come from this particular anonymous poster who signed off as Q, it wasn’t true and it didn’t happen. All these missed prognostications should have taken some of the wind out of Q’s sails, but that didn’t happen either. Q claimed to be a Washington insider who had direct contact with the President and intimate knowledge of his plans and methodologies. Q claimed to have what was called “Q-Clearance” or total access to all top-secret workings of the Federal Government. (Only the US Department of Energy actually uses the designation Q for security clearance, but no matter.)

The early posts from Q appeared on an image board called 4chan with much of the early analysis taking place on Reddit. Soon the posts, now known as “Q-drops,” and much of the alt-right community that frequented 4chan, migrated to another image board called 8chan after talk went around that 4chan had been “infiltrated.” 8chan was a “wild west” image board that existed most reliably on the so-called Dark Web and proudly boasted of it’s uncensored nature.

8chan was known mostly and notoriously as an online “cesspool” of white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, gun rights advocates, and child pornography enthusiasts. 8chan was taken down from the web by it’s server in the Summer of 2019 after a few mass shooter manifestos were published there prior to the shootings. It was relaunched a couple of months later, using a Russian server, as 8kun. Q-drops ceased during the period that 8chan was offline but returned with 8kun, which is to this day the landing place of Q-drops and the illustrious headquarters of the most militant factions of QAnon.

Q claims to be abiding with US Federal law by not directly revealing classified information to the public, even though many of the Q-drops, such as the first one, would certainly violate that law. So in order to forewarn a segment of society and perhaps enlist the assistance of that segment in the dramatic Federal operations that are purportedly about to go down, Q-drops are often written as obscure questions that followers must try to decipher and do the “research” on their own. They then can share with one another what they have discovered. Q mostly asks leading questions designed to get you where Q wants you to get to. The object is to make you think you earned it by doing a google search rather than just being told. Q is not really asking you to figure out anything particularly complex, but rather wants you to answer trivia questions and feel accomplished.

Q-drops are likened to a trail of breadcrumbs. QAnon “researchers” are often called “Bakers” because they take these crumbs and assemble them into the “Bread” or substance of the unfolding plot. With so many cooks in the kitchen, so to speak, the plot line of the conspiracy naturally takes off in multiple diverging directions. The “Bakers’’ can tend to create wildly imaginative loaves of intricate connections, generalities and unverifiable nonsense that takes the QAnon collective narrative into a territory of such intriguing complexity that no individual could have presaged it on their own. Nor can any one individual have a complete grasp of all the permutations and all the branches that have grown from it. So, if one is researching “facts” presented by Q fans or videos like The Fall of the Cabal, one will definitely find sources that will repeat the claims and insinuations, but the corroboration will lie only within the Q-o-sphere of dubious documents, twisted logic, out of context photographs, and coded but “significant” findings of other fans. It’s a closed information system that reinforces itself and builds pressure to a frenzy. QAnon can become something like an addictive video game to these avid “researchers” and can be much more exciting and appealing than their day to day lives offline.