Conspiracy Land |line Qanon is the latest in a long of conspiracy theories that feed on hatred and inspire violence. Can the US uproot these movements?
PHILADELPHIA — Omar Sabir explained his decision to his wife quietly, out of earshot of their six children, who were all under the age of 12. He needed to start spending nights at a hotel. Just in case.
The Nov. 3 presidential election was just days away. A year earlier, the bearded, broad-shouldered Sabir had won a campaign to serve as one of Philadelphia’s three city commissioners, an unglamorous position dedicated to the behind-the-scenes machinery of elections — voter registration drives, staffing polling stations, verifying election results.
Sabir, 41, sought the job because he worried about voter apathy in disadvantaged communities. Too many people didn’t believe there was a point to standing in line to cast their vote, and he figured he could convince them otherwise. But now he felt like a bull’s-eye had settled onto his back.
A caller to Philadelphia’s 311 center around that time had vowed that “Democrat politicians and election officials who support Black Lives Matter and who use voter fraud” would learn why the Second Amendment existed. “We are a thousand steps ahead of you motherf——-,” the man said, “and you’re walking right into the lion’s den.”
For months, President Donald Trump had used every bullhorn at his disposal — his rallies, his social media accounts, his sycophantic surrogates — to rile up his followers with baseless warnings of a sinister conspiracy: The presidential election would be stolen by Democrats. According to this twisted fantasy, urban cities like Philadelphia were especially complicit.
The drumbeat of doom was growing louder, more frenzied, amplified by tens of thousands of social media accounts that urged Trump’s supporters to take back their country, to “stop the steal.” Sabir’s mind wandered into the past, to Black civil rights pioneers like Octavius Catto and Medgar Evers, who were murdered for their efforts, and he was seized by a chilling thought: What if someone followed him home at night?
“The safest way for me to be with my family,” he said, “was for me to be away. I had to change my behavior patterns.”
They agreed to not tell the kids the real reason he had moved into a hotel.
In the days after the election, as thousands of mail-in votes that would help Joe Biden win the presidency were counted
within the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Sabir got a better sense of how the constant conspiracy chatter could provoke real-world responses.
Al Schmidt — a Republican commissioner who Trump claimed, in a tweet, refused “to look at a mountain of corruption & dishonesty” — received death threats, some of which included photos of his house, and, more ominously, the names of his children: “HEADS ON SPIKES, TREASONOUS SCHMIDTS.”
Lisa Deeley, the commissioners’ chairwoman, and a Democrat like Sabir, was followed and filmed by a Trump operative as she walked alone across Arch Street, toward the Convention Center’s Broad Street entrance. The video was shared on Parler, a right-wing social media platform, and on Twitter, where it attracted nearly 400,000 views.
“That’s when the real crazy comments started,” Deeley said. ““Let’s go to her house and kill her! She should be hung for treason!’ … I was scared to death.”
Nearly 280 miles from Philadelphia, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, a 61-year-old named Antonio Lamotta — who drew cartoons about government conspiracies and shared them on Twitter, and wrote on his website about using tanks to take over “law-less cities like New York and Seattle” — texted a man he knew, Joshua Macias.
“What’s going on in Pa.? You need me there?” Lamotta wrote.
“On standby,” responded Macias, the cofounder of a group called Vets for Trump.
“Is it a problem? … What kind? We need arms?” asked Lamotta.
“For each of us,” Macias responded. He and Lamotta loaded 150 rounds of ammunition and an Ar-15-style rifle into a silver Hummer. On its rear window was a red Q — for Qanon, a conspiracy movement that attracted scores of followers who bought a mind-bending message: Trump was single-handedly fighting a cabal of Democrats and celebrities enmeshed in a child sex trafficking ring, many of whom would be rounded up and arrested on Jan. 20, 2021.
Macias and Lamotta drove to Philadelphia. They planned to raid a “truckload of fake ballots.” Instead, they were arrested Nov. 5 outside the Convention Center, armed with Beretta handguns, amid a crowd of demonstrators who’d gathered under the night sky.
As frightening and bizarre as Qanon sounds — the FBI designated it a domestic terror threat — the movement is just the latest mutation in a long line of conspiracy theories that are nearly as old as America itself, many of which fed on the darkest impulses in the country’s psyche: racism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, white supremacy.
But the last decade has shown that new communities of deluded believers can form almost overnight. The Sandy Hook school massacre, the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election have all become rallying cries for conspiracy theorists who live in an alternate reality, one where tragedies are just set pieces in a shadowy play.
Some of these theories have become a central thread in America’s political fabric
— especially in Pennsylvania, where eight Republican U.S. Congress members voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. The party’s most prominent local members avoid discussing how to reckon with the harm of election conspiracy theories. State Rep. Martina White, who is also chair of Philadelphia’s Republican City Committee, declined an interview request on the topic. And the 139 Republicans who hold seats in the state House and Senate didn’t respond when The Inquirer asked if they believed in Qanon, or false claims about COVID-19 being a hoax.
The risk of allowing conspiracy theories to run unchecked — or, even worse, to be politically endorsed — became clear on Jan. 6, when thousands of Trump supporters, some of them dressed in Q regalia, stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory. The failed insurrection left five people dead. Of the 360 people who have been arrested so far for participating in the attack, about 10% are from Pennsylvania.
Polling data shows that 73% of Americans believe that conspiracy theories are spiraling out of control, and U.S. intelligence officials warn that some of those theories are inspiring domestic terrorism. In cities and towns across the country, some of the more wild-eyed beliefs are dividing families and lifelong friends, and seeding future threats to public safety. The image we hold of each other has become warped, fueled by fear and disinformation. Undoing this damage won’t be easy.