Aftermath of A Coup: The Threat Lives On
At its core, QAnon is a combination of two classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories
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 (functionally similar to a Yahoo chat or Facebook group) — 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 by another anonymous pseudoinsider, 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 were against Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort and Manafort’s former business partner, Rick Gates. Yet, Q 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.
Gaming’s evil twin
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 identifiable 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 repurposing of hatred’s oldest hits.”
Read the online version of this story to learn of QAnon’s origins and its connection to gaming culture at https://tinyurl.com/Aftermath-of-a-coup/.