Quebec Qanon followers question beliefs
Quebec adherents to the Qanon conspiracy movement are questioning their faith after Joe Biden became the president of the United States on Wednesday — an event that, according to the tenets of their online doctrine, was never supposed to happen.
“We all look like idiots,” one person wrote on a popular French-language Qanon discussion board.
The board is run by Alexis Cossette-trudel, the popular conspiracy theorist behind Radio- Québec, a platform on which he interprets Q messages and makes predictions. He had assured Q followers that Jan. 20 would be the day when Q's promised “storm” would take place. The military, it was foretold, would depose Biden and arrest “deep state” actors, and Donald Trump would retain power.
Such is the nature of the Qanon conspiracy: its adherents interpret vague messages posted online by “Q,” a supposed military insider close to Trump. The messages assure them that Trump is plotting the downfall of the globalist cabal — people like the Clintons, who are supposedly simultaneously running a network of pedophiles and nefariously planning a new world order.
The conspiracy is baseless.
The movement has had a profound effect on U.S. politics, but now Q has gone dark. No “Q drops” — cryptic messages from Q — have been posted since Dec. 8, and supporters are starting to question their beliefs.
“What happens next?” one person asked on the French discussion board.
“Maybe we've been had,” wrote another.
Biden's ascension to the presidency has dealt the greatest blow yet to the Qanon movement, and a number of the messages posted on Cossette-trudel's discussion board expressed doubt in the movement, but some of its more strident adherents are clinging to their faith as strongly as ever.
“I believe,” wrote one user. “My friends tell me I'm crazy, but they're too impatient. Alexis is never wrong, tonight Bidon (sic) is going to get arrested.”
It's a pattern that has played out before, said Jack Bratich, an associate professor of journalism and media studies at New Jersey's Rutgers University who monitors the movement.
After Trump lost the election in November, “they kept pushing the date,” Bratich said. “This time it might be a little more difficult to reintegrate the movement. I think it's fragile right now.”
Deep-rooted Christian narratives about the new world order may have planted the seeds of the Qanon movement, Bratich said, but it claims broad appeal because it provides a sense of community to its followers.
“At the core of it, people are trying to make sense of a world in crisis,” he said. “That's the generous read of what gets people to move towards these things that really give them a sense of purpose and also truth. They believe they have a certain foundational truth about how the world works.”
It is partly this appeal that lends Qanon its cross-cultural impact, Bratich suspects; it only took someone like Cossette-trudel to translate Q into French for it to propagate on a large scale in Quebec. Exactly how far it has spread here is unclear, but there are more than 12,000 users on the discussion board run by Cossette-trudel, most of whom are ostensibly in Quebec.
Cossette-trudel disabled the discussion on the board as of Thursday afternoon, saying there were too many comments — over 4,000 in less than 24 hours — for him to moderate.
He promised to publish another video soon to explain what was happening, but he seemed unsure why the Q prediction had yet to come true. “Let's give it a little more time, friends,” he told the community.
Cossette-trudel had previously projected confidence that Trump would be president at the end of January. In a recent video, he continued to urge his followers to keep the faith in Q and in Trump, whom he assured them was still in control.
The alternative — “that Trump was surrounded only by incompetent people, and Trump has screwed up for four years” — was unthinkable, he declared.